The Controller's Office
Philadelphia's City Controller can diagnose the city's financial dysfunction down to the dollar. Fixing it is someone else's job.
In 2018, Rebecca Rhynhart released an audit as City Controller. The findings were extraordinary: $33 million missing from the city’s largest cash account, and $924 million in bookkeeping errors the city could not explain. The audit found the city’s accounting controls were the worst of the ten largest U.S. cities. No one went to jail. No one was fired. The response was to form a committee.
The Controller’s office is the city’s independent auditor. It watches the store. It finds the waste. It sounds the alarm.
Sounding the alarm is all it can do.
A watchdog that can diagnose but not treat. That’s the Controller’s office. They find the rot. They don’t get to cut it out.
After the 2018 audit, a new accounting system was promised. Consultants were hired. Commissions were formed. The Finance Department brought in help. The gap between finding and fixing had calcified into something that looked a lot like governance.
By 2025, more reports surfaced. More problems continued. The responses were inadequate. The same patterns the 2018 audit documented were still appearing in the city’s books. Part of the waste the Controller documents is not dollars at all but hours — I ran the meeting-cost math in The Cost of Meetings and got back to nearly a thousand phantom FTEs of city labor.
Rebecca Rhynhart ran for Mayor in 2023. She lost in the Democratic primary. The problems she documented as Controller did not leave with her. They are still there. They are still being documented. They are still not being fixed. Every November, the same office publishes a press release on the price of Thanksgiving dinner — I wrote about that absurdity in The City of Philadelphia Is Checking Turkey Prices Instead of Balancing Its Checkbook.
The watchdog barks. The Mayor decides whether the dog gets fed.
The audit came out in 2018. The system that produced the errors is still in place.