So?......

...... anything happen while I was gone?

Why Not Joe?

I know what you're saying to yourself after reading my last post, "Hey, Graham ain't  the right guy to be selling  STEP to working-class folks like me. Old Main shudda sent JoePa out to charm us plain-folk." 

Well, you know that was Plan A. There were supposed to be three "Evenings With Joe Paterno" this spring and before each of them, STEP was on the agenda. Unfortunately, all three of these events had to be canceled because...Well, I'll let Graham explain.

"Coach Paterno has had intestinal issues this summer that have forced him to limit his efforts to team activities and therefore some of his personal appearances have been cancelled," university president Graham Spanier said Monday night in an e-mail.

That's right, Joe hasn't been able to stop shitting himself since Graham told him he'd have to help explain to people why a 500% increase in that tax deductible kickback was really all so working-class.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Spanier, Paterno, Seat Transfer and Equity Plan,

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Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010: Salary and Compensation Data

Before I do any more analysis of the Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010, here are the parts that everyone is interested in. The data, which is for fiscal year 2008-2009, comes from pdf pages 38, 40 and 63 of the report.

Enjoy.

Fraud: Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010

Bill Schackner at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has an update this morning to his report yesterday on the Penn State Right-To-Know Report 2010.And Penn State Bullshit Artist Geoff Rushton lawyers-up,

Penn State's tax filing did not identify officers or trustees of the university who have relatives employed by Penn State. Pitt provided that information in its tax filing, citing revised IRS rules this year.
Geoff Rushton, a Penn State spokesman, said Friday that school trustees and a consultant who worked with Penn State on its right-to-know filing authorized alternative language. Later Friday, he said an attorney for the university would be taking a second look at the requirement to be sure.
The language used in Penn State's filing was:
"The University knows of no significant transactions between it and any person described in the question other than transactions in the normal course of its activities. All such transactions are conducted at arm's length for good and sufficient consideration and the University believes that the terms and conditions of any such transactions have been fair and reasonable."

Let's take a closer look at this issue through the wool that Geoff is trying to pull over our eyes.

There is a long check list on the Form 990 for tax year 2008, which forms the bulk of the Right-To-Know Report, for determining what schedules an organization must fill out. Question 28 concerns financial arrangements between the organization and, colloquially speaking, influential people in the organization.

28 During the tax year, did any person who is a current or former officer, director, trustee, or key employee:

a Have a direct business relationship with the organization (other than as an officer, director, trustee, or
employee), or an indirect business relationship through ownership of more than 35% in another entity
(individually or collectively with other person(s) listed in Part VII, Section A)? If "Yes, " complete Schedule L,
Part IV .
b Have a family member who had a direct or indirect business relationship with the organization? If "Yes,"
complete Schedule L, Part IV .

c Serve as an officer, director, trustee, key employee, partner, or member of an entity (or a shareholder of a
professional corporation) doing business with the organization? If "Yes," complete Schedule L, Part IV. .

Penn State answered yes to Question 28 b (p. 6; All pages are pdf pages in the RTK Report.) . Hence there is no doubt that  such individuals exist, yet they didn't complete Schedule L, Part IV (p. 47), because, "The University knows of no significant transactions between it and any person described in the question other than transactions in the normal course of its activities." This rationale does not pass the smell test  The instructions for for Schedule L is as clear as day on this issue.

Report in Part IV business transactions for which payments were made during the organization’s tax year between the organization and an interested person, if such payments exceeded the reporting thresholds described below, and regardless of when the transaction was entered into by the parties. The “ordinary course of business” exception to reporting business relationships on Form 990, Part V, line 2, does not apply for purposes of Schedule L.

Here are the reporting thresholds from the instructions.

In general, an organization must report business transactions in Part IV with respect to an interested person if: (1) all payments during the tax year between the organization and the interested person exceeded $100,000; (2) all payments during the tax year from a single transaction between such parties exceeded the greater of $10,000 or 1% of the filing organization’s total revenues; (3) compensation payments during the tax year by the organization to a family member of certain persons exceeded $10,000; or (4) in the case of a joint venture with an interested person, the organization has invested $10,000 or more in the joint venture, whether or not during the tax year.

It is easy enough to see that there are is at least two individuals one person who meet  meets the third threshold. Old Main lists Graham as an officer and Joe Paterno as a key employee (p. 40) Now  and Graham's wife Sandra is an English prof at the University and Joe's son Jay is an assistant football coach.  Both Sandra falls within the definition of family member from the glossary of terms in the instruction for Form 990,

Unless specified otherwise, the family of an individual includes only his or her spouse, ancestors, brothers and sisters (whether whole or half blood), children (whether natural or adopted), grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and spouses of brothers, sisters, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren(;)

and it is hard to imagine that either of them earning  she earns less than $10k a year. It's a sure bet that at a minimum these people Graham's wife should have been listed on Schedule L, Part IV. 

With thirty-two trustees, five officers-actually six but Graham's both an officer and a trustee-five key employees and the Flying Spaghetti Monster knows how many family members, there's a very good chance that the list on Schedule L, Part IV if filled out correctly would be very long.

Why did Old Main neglect to complete Schedule L, Part IV.  Graham just doesn't s like any transparency and my guess is that he and his Old Main brain trust  hoped that no one would notice. In fact, they did their best to keep the report out of public view by posting  it with no fanfare on an obscure place in on their Web site and   in a scanned pdf which would likely be bypassed by search engines.  Further,  unlike Pitt, which did complete this schedule, Penn State doesn't have to file their Form 990 with the IRS so there really isn't much of a consequence for them fraudulently filling it out should they be caught , beyond whatever small potatoes sanctions the Commonwealth's Right-To-Know law imposes.  So they figured that cheating was worth the gamble. 

[Corrected:5/30/10 9:52 pm]
Technorati Tags: Penn State, Right-To-Know, cheating, Spanier, Paterno

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Penn State's 2010 Right-To-Know Report is Deficient

I'm still working on converting  the scanned pdf to a searchable one. Hence a full analysis is a ways off, but as I was going over the filing last night I noticed at least one  deficiency in the report.

On page 4, Old Main answered yes to Question 28 b: During the tax year, did any person who is a current or former officer director, trustee or key employee have a family member who had  a direct or indirect business relationship  with the organization? By answering yes, the University is required to fill out schedule L which details the relationship. They didn't.  For example, the salary of Sandra Spanier, Graham's wife, must be reported on Schedule L. It wasn't. I'm not clear on the concept of key employee, but JoPa would seem to fit the bill. If that's true, then JayPa's salary must be  reported on Schedule L. But nothing was reported on Schedule L...Nada...

I'm sure I'll have more to say once my conversion project is complete.,

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Penn State's 2010 Right-To-Know Report, Sandra Spanier, Jay Paterno

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Speaking of David Jones,...

...I've found the third article in his three article series on Graham and Joe. In it, for the first time, Graham gives his side of the Great McKee St. Standoff of 2004. His version of events is in direct contradiction of Joes'.

Who then should you believe? Well, we know that Graham and the truth aren't on the best of terms. For example, consider the fact that he told Jones that he hasn't told the story of his father to anyone, even though he'd told the entire university community in his inaugural address in 1995. I'd go with Joes' account.

Technorati Tags: Penn State, Paterno, Spanier, Spin

Spanier Revealed...

...Okay, not so much.

In my last post, I drew your attention to three articles on Graham which were slated to run today in the Harrisburg Patriot-News. The author, David Jones, promised these would be revealing. I could only find two articles. Perhaps Jones' editor decided that three wasn't a charm.

What do these two articles tell us about Graham?

Graham On His Dad

One of the two stories focuses on Graham's relationship to his father. According to Jones, "...Spanier said he hasn't shared this story of his upbringing with Paterno or, for that matter, many others." That's funny, I remember him sharing the story about his father with the whole University in his inaugural address in 1995. In fact, I remember this very well, because I thought its Oprah worthy confessional nature was an embarrassment to Penn State, particularly when compared Clark Kerr's highly intellectual inaugural address at Berkeley in 1958. Here's the passage from Graham's confessional.

In 1936, with a few deutsche marks sewn into his collar secretly by his mother, but with no other possessions, a 15-year-old German boy named Fritz managed to escape the oppression of Nazi Germany, and found his way to South Africa. Fritz was never to see most of his family again. Twenty of his close relatives died in the death camps. Fritz learned English, became a citizen of South Africa, fought for that country during the war, and in 1947 married a woman from Johannesburg. A year and a half later, a son was born in Capetown.

In that year, 1948, apartheid became the official policy of South Africa, and Fritz became disturbed by the parallels between what he left behind in Germany and what now surrounded him in South Africa. So in 1949, Fritz came to the United States by himself, settled in Chicago, saved a few dollars from his job loading and unloading trucks in a warehouse, and a few months later persuaded his wife to come to Chicago along with the infant child.

Fritz Otto Spanier, my father, known in America as Fred, died at 64, an unhappy man after years of ill health, never experiencing the prosperity that other immigrants found. For most of his adult life he was a working-class man with upper-middle-class aspirations. He valued learning, but never knew formal education. He allowed people to believe he had a college degree because he was too embarrassed to admit he did not.

Yet something almost inexplicable happened during this man's life that would have lasting impact on his family. Despite the fact that neither he nor anyone else in his family had ever set foot on a college campus, he and his wife managed to instill in their children a healthy respect for education. Their three children now have among them seven university degrees.

This story is not as unusual as it might seem, since I am certain many of you, like me, are the first in your families to attend college. Many of our students, too, carry with them the hopes of the future for their entire family constellations.

I tell you all of this to communicate something about my values. The university experience means far more to me than turning students into alumni or turning ideas into publications. For me, education is society's mechanism for turning despair into hope, for raising the social consciousness of the community, for altering the course of families, for turning poverty into wealth, and for improving the quality of life. Only education could allow a poor immigrant who grew up on the south side of Chicago to become the President of Penn State.

The first bit that I've emphasized communicated more to me about Graham's values than I think Graham had had intended to communicate. As they say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Graham's dad had status issues and allowed people believe he had a college degree. Graham clear also has status issues-if you don't think so you haven't been reading this blog-and he misleads people about his accomplishments and that of the University he leads.

The only thing new that Graham tells us in the Jones piece is that as a kid his family was poooooooor and he assures us that when he lived in Highland Park, IL as a kid, it wasn't ritzy place that we know today. A place where the median family income in 2006 was
$117,235. Was Graham bullshitting about being so poor he went to bed hungry? Hard to say, but I'm doubtful.

Graham and Tom

The other piece in the Patriot-News today is about Graham's relationship with Tom Osborne while the former was chancellor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the latter was the head football coach there.

The story tells us that Osborne, before Graham's arrival, had put into place a succession plan which had an assistant athletic director moving into the AD slot as a placeholder until Osborne was ready to retire from coaching and take the AD job himself. Graham upset the applecart. He hired as AD his own guy from Oregon State, where he had been vice-provost for academic affairs immediately prior to going to Nebraska.

This provides a little more background in to the folklore surrounding Graham's move to Penn State in 1995. The folklore has it that Graham was Paterno's choice to head Penn State. The primary evidence for this is that the chair of the Board of Trustees at the time was Paterno's buddy Bill Scheryer. The folklore also has it that Osborne, another Paterno buddy, had some role in recommending Graham.

I have heard this folktale in real time from many people some of whom had connections to both Scheryer and Paterno. Hence it has some credibility to me.

It may be that Joe and Bill were doing Tom a favor by helping him unload Graham after his applecart upsetting performance.

Why would JoePa want to bring in someone who had dumped apples on the sidewalks of Lincoln? For one thing JoePa had, in 1993, installed a 39 or 40 year old Tim Curely as AD. Paterno's boy Curley was there for the long haul. The applecart in Happy Valley wasn't going to be tipped and anyway thirteen years ago Paterno likely was sure he could handle anybody in a bureaucratic knife fight. Hey, and he probably still can.

In summary, there's nothing earth shattering in today's Patriot-News.