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# Cemetery director fights for reputation
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/cemetery-director-fights-for-reputation/
- Published: 2006-01-03T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T17:01:16.000Z
- Author: Ryan Hyatt
- Tags: Government & Politics, Pico, #archive-import

*Director put on leave*

CITY HALL — A personnel hearing to determine if the director of the city’s cemetery was incompetent or just had his own management style which led to financial troubles at the graveyard will resume next week.

Michael Steen was fired this past fall after three audits revealed the management of Woodlawn Cemetery’s finances was not in line with general accounting practices. Steen, who is appealing his dismissal, said he has his own management style and had a lack of appropriate resources from City Hall.

That’s according to testimony from both sides at a personnel board hearing held last month. The hearing will continue Jan. 9.

Steen appealed City Hall’s decision to terminate him in September after a nine-month investigation concluded there was no criminal wrongdoing on his part regarding financial discrepancies discovered at Woodlawn, a municipal cemetery located between Pico Boulevard and Michigan Avenue, from 14th to 17th streets. Officials at City Hall haven’t said specifically how much money might not be accounted for at Woodlawn or what revenue might remain so. They have, however, paid outside firms for two audits, as well as conducted their own audit, all of which have shown discrepancies in Woodlawn’s financial books.

The cemetery brings in about $450,000 a year in revenue. Because Steen’s firing is a personnel matter, city officials won’t elaborate on circumstances surrounding the criminal investigation, or his termination — beyond what is said in the appeal hearing, which is public record.

Steen — described as well-liked and well-respected during his 15-year tenure as Woodlawn’s director — was placed on paid administrative leave in December of 2004 while City Hall investigated his financial management of the cemetery.

As a result of his termination, Steen has taken private funeral jobs which pay between $200 and $300 a week, according to his domestic partner, who asked to remain anonymous in fear of reprisals related to his full-time job.

That’s a fraction of the $100,000-plus annual salary Steen is believed to have earned as Woodlawn’s top administrator. Considering the fact no criminal charges have been filed, Steen hopes to clear his name and be compensated by City Hall through the course of the appeal, his domestic partner said.

“There are two points trying to be achieved with this appeal,” Steen’s domestic partner said. “One is trying to clear Michael’s name. The other is to see to it that Michael is compensated for the loss of his job, since it’s unlikely at this point that the city would be willing to give it back to him, or that he would even take it, if they offered.”

After Steen appealed his termination, the matter was set to go before a five-person personnel board, whose members are appointed and neither hold public office nor are city employees. The board serves as an advisory to the City Council and City Hall’s human resources director. It is a quasi-judicial review body for employee appeals of disciplinary actions. The Dec. 8 hearing had four board members present.

The testimony presented at the December personnel board hearing centered around the last of three major audits specifically aimed at ascertaining the financial state of affairs at Woodlawn.

MINDING THE DOLLARS AND CENTS Irma Rodriguez-Moisa, an attorney with Liebert, Cassidy and Whitmore, has been representing City Hall in the case. Her role is to advocate City Hall’s position to the personnel board.

Rodriguez-Moisa said Steen began his tenure at Woodlawn in 1989\. During the 1990s, occasional audits first showed signs of financial discrepancies at the cemetery. However, it wasn’t until an audit of the2001-02 fiscal year conducted by an outside accounting firm — Moss, Levy & Hartzheim — in which a “significant number of issues came up,” Rodriguez-Moisa said.

A letter from ML&H to City Hall regarding its audit and findings states, “The cemetery did not have adequate audit trails or records available to determine if internal controls existed. The internal controls appear to have been inadequate or non-existent...”

ML&H didn’t draw definitive conclusions about what questionable financial role Steen may or may not have played in the cemetery’s operations. Instead, its 13 findings, mirrored in two subsequent audits, examined the discrepancies and what opportunities they might have presented for misappropriation of funds. Some of the major findings included: An inadequate segregation of staff duties; delays in processing purchases; a lack of checks and balances in money handling; no official inventory of sold and unsold burial plots; no manual for office procedures; the use of two different invoice books; and the lack of a method “to be able to reconcile sales of inventory plots with revenue received.”

As a possible ethical discrepancy, ML&H’s audit pointed out that the spouse of a Steen assistant received a contract for ground maintenance at the cemetery, indicating a potential compromise in the bidding process.

Counsel for Steen argued the maintenance contract, which has since expired, was arranged through City Hall’s purchasing department, not through Steen.

Steen’s manager, Gil Borboa, issued a corrective action plan to address the lack of internal controls that the ML&H audit pointed out, but Steen didn’t accept it, according to records. He also didn’t accept the evaluation of his performance in 2001, which signaled that as a manager, Steen was to implement internal controls in the cemetery’s operation that better accounted for the incoming revenue. Instead, he appealed the evaluation. The appeal required City Hall to make some changes in its corrective action plan. Otherwise, City Hall’s position was upheld, Rodriguez-Moisa said.

Meanwhile, City Hall responded to the audit by indicating it would make several improvements at the cemetery, including an updating of office technology and bookkeeping capabilities, as well as the construction of a newer, larger office.

In 2002, then-City Manager Susan McCarthy asked another outside auditing firm, KPMG, to follow up on the 2001 audit. The new audit, however, wasn’t available until 2004, according to testimony. KPMG was only able to provide an unsigned draft of its audit, which it presented to City Hall in July of 2004\. It’s unknown why there was a two-year delay in presenting the audit or why it was an unsigned draft.

After reviewing the KPMG audit, which testimony said mirrored many of the key findings of the ML&H audit, City Hall conducted its own audit.

That audit was overseen by Steve Stark, City Hall’s finance director. Stark asked Mabel Borja, a senior finance manager with the city’s Big Blue Bus to lead the audit.

Borja — whose accounting career spans more than 20 years — developed a plan to test the findings in the previous audits. The goal was to sample 3 to 10 percent of the 820 financial transactions for fiscal year 2003-04 at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Borja said she and at least one assistant set up a table outside the cemetery’s office after interviewing staff and debriefing them on the nature of the financial review. The auditors began to request documents — which Steen, and his assistant, Phyllis Romleski, as well as a temporary employee — helped Borja obtain, according to testimony.

Cemetery staff is said to have cooperated fully with Borja’s audit.

By December of 2004, Borja had prepared a draft report regarding her audit, the findings of which she said took 400 to 500 total staff hours to investigate and prepare. Of the 42 completed transactions surveyed, 19 — or 45 percent — had what were considered to be “exceptions” contrary to general accounting guidelines, according to testimony.

While those exceptions may have provided an opportunity for criminal behavior, they also did not show any occurred, Borja said.

Borja’s audit seemed to show not much had changed in the financial management at Woodlawn since the previous audits — some of the findings of which Steen had disputed. Discrepancies pointed to a lack of precise recorded knowledge of which burial plots had been purchased and which were still up for sale.

Many customers were paying for their plots in installments, and some had failed to pay over the course of years more than $200 on a total bill ranging in the thousands, according to testimony.

Bill Becker, Steen’s attorney, pointed out during the hearing that his client’s strengths rest on his customer service and people skills, and that finance was not his strongest suit.

Becker also indicated steps City Hall had previously promised to put into place to improve Woodlawn operations had been slow to materialize. He noted that it had taken years to fully investigate the alleged financial misconduct at cemetery. An electronic geographic map system — to pinpoint the status of burial plots at any time— has yet to be installed. A new office expected to replace the current one, which is described as “cramped,” may not have even begun construction, he said.

“I’m just trying to show the city hasn’t treated (Woodlawn operations) like an emergency situation,” Becker said.

Becker’s comments were dismissed by the personnel board, which agreed with City Hall’s counsel that Becker’s remarks were out of the purview of Steen’s appeal.

Borja said city staff recovered $17,000 of $21,105 worth of credit card transactions for fiscal year 2003-04 during the course of staff’s audit. The credit card transactions had never been posted but should have been, according to invoice statements, she said.

At the same time, representatives from City Hall conceded that the lost credit card transactions may have been augmented by the cemetery’s billing arrangement with the water department.

Invoices requesting credit card purchases for items such as coffins and crypts were faxed to City Hall’s water department, which handles billing for the city’s utilities division.

Those invoices were then ran through a credit card machine, a copy of which was supposed to be faxed back to the cemetery for record keeping.

In the cases where transactions didn’t go through, City Hall was unable to ascertain if the cemetery or the water department was to blame. “(Some of the transactions) seemed to have fallen through the cracks,” Stark said.

Fax machine errors might have explained why the water department might not have received requests for credit card purchases, and therefore why some may had not gone through. However, City Hall, while admitting its own system wasn’t perfect, suggested Steen or other cemetery staff may have been partially to blame for such mishaps.

“Would someone with an accounting or finance background be needed to make sure credit card purchases went through?” Rodriguez-Moisa asked Borja.

“No,” Borja said. “It’s routine to follow up with such things in an office, especially when it involves money.”

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 3, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/010306.pdf?ref=smdp.com)