Texas congressman uncovers NRCC money trouble by following his routine

U.S. Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Midland, was eyeballing financial statements long before he became audit chairman for the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2007.
Conaway, a certified public accountant, triggered a federal investigation and the discovery of a $1.7 million cash-on-hand discrepancy by following his usual routine for audits.
NRCC ex-treasurer Christopher J. Ward is at the center of an FBI criminal investigation now, and officials allege he made unauthorized transfers from the fundraising committee's coffers into his own business and bank accounts.
Neither Ward nor his lawyer, Ronald Machen, responded to requests for comment Thursday.
But here is the bespectacled Conaway of the 11th Congressional District in Texas telling the story of the intial discovery in his own words:
"I had made it a practice of having a face-to-face meeting of the auditors of either a company or a not-for-profit or any kind of an organization ... typically without management guys in the room. So you have this meeting with the auditors. You go over the financial statements.
And then you exclude management for just a brief period of time just to see if there's anything the auditors want to talk about to you that they don't want to say in front of management.
Ninety-nine times out of 100, that meeting without management lasts a minute and half because there's never anything to talk about.
So that process was going on in December and January because we were told the audit was done, and we were trying to schedule that meeting face to face with the auditors, and we had it finally scheduled for Jan. 28 at 4 o'clock.
I happened to be over at the NRCC at 3:30 for something else and went in and was told that they'd just received an e-mail from Chris Ward saying that in fact no '06 audit had been done, and that he had been, in effect, lying to us that whole time.
That's how this whole thing got triggered.
We immediately began to try to figure out what had happened.
I called the firm that we thought we'd been dealing with. They, of course, had never heard of us."