wfn.org | TAFO Committee Will Fight Move to Reduce Its Membership

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

4-February-1998 
98041 
 
                TAFO Committee Will Fight Move to 
                    Reduce Its Membership 
 
                    by Jerry L. Van Marter 
 
SANTA MONICA, Calif.-The Technology and Finance Office (TAFO) Committee 
says it will fight a recommendation that its membership be reduced from 12 
to five members. 
 
    The recommendation to reduce the TAFO Committee is coming to the 
upcoming meeting of the General Assembly Council in Louisville from an 
"implementation work group" appointed last fall by GAC chair Fred Denson. 
The implementation group was formed in response to directives from last 
year's General Assembly and the GAC to restructure the office of the 
executive director of the GAC and TAFO. 
 
    The decision to fight the TAFO Committee downsizing move came during 
the committee's Jan. 23-24 meeting here - a meeting dominated by an 
examination of the future role of TAFO, which has seen its responsibilities 
and power steadily erode over the past year. 
 
    In December of 1996, the TAFO (then Corporate and Administrative 
Services, or CAS) director, G.A. "Pat" Goff, was relieved of his duties, as 
was one of his top aides, Michael Tronzo.  Goff and Tronzo had championed 
an accounting software package that failed, jeopardizing the PC(USA)'s 1996 
external audit. 
 
    At about the same time, sweeping changes in GAC operations were 
proposed by the Arthur Andersen consulting firm, which resulted in the 
removal of most nonaccounting functions from TAFO's responsibilities.  In 
September, the GAC transferred oversight responsibilities for the 
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), A Corporation from TAFO to the Council's 
Executive Committee. 
 
    The TAFO Committee had asked for consultation with GAC leaders prior to 
a shift of the corporation responsibilities last fall and TAFO Committee 
chair the Rev. Hugh Burroughs of Berkeley, Calif., sharply questioned 
Denson in Santa Monica on that point.  Burroughs said he understood that 
Denson would make a motion to rule such a shift out of order, but when the 
motion came - from GAC member Youngil Cho - Denson allowed the motion to be 
put to a vote and it passed narrowly. 
 
    "I am dismayed, sir," Burroughs told Denson, "that GAC gave corporate 
responsibilities to its Executive Committee without consultation.  When one 
GAC body requests consultation, there should be consultation." 
 
    Denson replied that the motion came not from another GAC entity, but 
from an individual member on the floor of the Council meeting.  He said 
that under those circumstances, "I had to rule that the motion was properly 
before the house." 
 
    TAFO Committee member Robert Salati of Laurel Springs, N.J., questioned 
whether the GAC Executive Committee will have the time "to give the kind of 
intense review to corporation matters that TAFO can."  Burroughs agreed, 
but Denson suggested that TAFO could continue to serve as "a property and 
finance subcommittee to the Executive Committee."  Burroughs replied that 
no such structure is yet in place for such an arrangement, and Louis 
Jacobo, an accountant from Phoenix, Ariz., said such a move would "dilute a 
critically necessary oversight function." 
 
    TAFO Committee member John A. Rodgers of McMurray, Pa., said the 
restructuring effort generally is "putting too much oversight authority in 
the hands of two few people."  Salati, who is a member of the 
implementation work group, agreed, adding, "The original recommendation was 
that TAFO be eliminated altogether - we were looking at zero and wound up 
with five. ... I got what I could get." 
 
    TAFO Committee member Raymond Anglin of Plantation, Fla., asked if it 
was too late to slow down the proposed restructuring "until we have more 
clarity and consensus."  Denson replied that there is "an unwritten 
mandate" to have the new structure in place by this year's General 
Assembly.  Denson, a former CAS chair, agreed that "shifting all this stuff 
to the Executive Committee just overloads them" and encouraged TAFO to 
develop counterproposals. 
 
    Burroughs said the first task will be to defeat the TAFO Committee 
reduction motion "and then explain our thinking about how the staff 
functions that are being moved around should be overseen by elected persons 
and entities." 
 
    Surveying what is left of TAFO's responsibilities, interim TAFO 
director Robert McKee suggested that "we just rename TAFO `Financial 
Services.'" 

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