D.C.’s top finance officer has passed blame for his office’s role in the charter school scandal to Board of Education Vice President Carolyn Graham.

In a Nov. 14 letter to District Council Member Kathy Patterson, D-Ward 3, Natwar Gandhi said his office approved a $15,000-plus payment to a suspect contractor because Graham ordered his staff to do so.

“The D.C. Board of Education has oversight responsibility and authority to certify the delivery of goods and services,” Gandhi said in the letter.

The letter refers to payments to Equal Access in Education. In March, whistle-blower Steve Kapani told the Board of Education and the Inspector General’s office that he suspected Equal Access was one of several companies being used by charter schools executive Brenda Belton to funnel money to herself, her family and her friends.

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Two months later, Gandhi’s office paid Equal Access and other questionable vendors. Graham sent a memo to the schools’ then-finance officer, John Musso, demanding the payments be made.

Mary Levy is a staff attorney who focuses on public education for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. She said she is not surprised that Gandhi is trying to shift the blame.

“Despite Dr. Gandhi’s impressive accomplishments for the District as a whole, 10 years of experience running school system fiscal operations have produced more embarrassments than accomplishments,” Levy told The Examiner. This makes it easier for the corrupt to profit, Levy said.

“Because responsibility is split, the school system and finance office staff blame each other for failures, and no one is accountable,” she said.

Sources within the school system have said that schools comptroller Abinet Belachew stopped payments to Equal Access even before Kapani’s warning. Graham’s memo to Musso was apparently enough to overrule him.

In his letter to Patterson, Gandhi said his office now requires more extensive documentation for any payments out of the schools.

Gandhi defended himself and his agency in an e-mail sent by his spokeswoman, Maryann Young.

“We have completed five years of balanced budgets since 2001, the year the system produced a $65 million operating deficit, with five years of clean audit opinions from our external independent auditors,” Gandhi wrote.

The finance office has tried to bring new financial management systems to the schools, but “there have been no takers,” Gandhi wrote.

bmyers@dcexaminer.com