2020: The Event

The November 2020 general election was the event that led me on a long tortuous path of discovery. Ultimately, I concluded there is governance problem within the Arizona Counties.

Like a lot of people nationwide, I watched in amazement as Maricopa County took weeks to count the ballots following the election. Then there was the audit count, canvasing, allegations, and lawsuits. When was it going to end?

Regardless of your political beliefs, most people could agree that Maricopa County’s Election Performance was anomalous, even if you thought the outcome was fair or unfair. Most people focused on the election outcome as a measure of fairness.

Some people might consider me strange; I was more interested in the anomalies than the outcome. I keep pondering about what the county was going to do with those anomalies? Or, were they simply going to ignore them.

My interest in those election anomalies was influenced by my career. I had retired before the 2020 general election. I worked for a large company, which operated in the financial sector. My last position involved Corrective Action Plans (CAP). In my role, CAP was a process used to investigate financial anomalies to ensure that my company wasn’t sued by a client or fined by a regulator.

CAP became a regulatory requirement following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). The bill was enacted because of accounting scandals in major publicly traded companies, including Enron, Tyco International, Adelphia, Peregrine Systems, and WorldCom. These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the share prices of affected companies collapsed. Lawmakers intervened to restore public confidence in the stock markets.

The SOX Act sought to ensure investors could make appropriate trading decisions by improving financial reporting accuracy, establishing strict internal controls, and holding corporate executives personally accountable. It focused heavily on executive responsibility, auditor independence, and criminal penalties to prevent fraudulent practices.

Initially, my company did not embrace CAP when the process was rolled out. For many employees, it seemed like an unnecessary burden. It was just more documentation to do what they would have done anyway. The culture failed to immediately recognize that this roll out was a federal obligation, Under the law, a formal means to document deviations from standards was necessary so the problem could be evaluated for compliance, investigated for cause and corrective action plans established to resolve the problem. CAP became the term used to describe how problems were identified and resolved.

Federal regulators identified poor CAP implementation problem. A fine ensued, which was followed by an awakening. Federal regulators were using CAP as an oversight tool to ensure financial fraud would not recur. Soon thereafter, CAP was relied upon to consistently resolve issues that warranted attention; CAP became a way of doing business and was no longer considered an obstacle.

I saw CAP transform a culture from “let’s just get this done” to “let’s do this the right way.”

I began to see problems differently; they became CAP opportunities. What can we learn from this problem to improve performance.

Though retired, I dwelled on these election anomalies. I wanted to understand what happened.

Related Governance Principles

• ⚖️ Principle 1 - Tone at the Top
• 👁️ Principle 2 - Oversight
• 🔍 Principle 16 - Monitoring

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