Raise your hand if you thought hk business gift that whole BP gift card thing was going to go off without a hitch?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

The BP gift card brouhaha is an early warning sign we need to take seriously.

If we can’t manage $2.4 million in gift cards to give visitors “fun money” to spend while they are here, we have no chance of being trusted with the real big bucks that could come this way through the RESTORE Act.

In one sense,hk executive gift the fact that we are put on alert at all is promising.

It means someone was running a check and balance on the books, found something that didn’t add up and pointed it out. And it was shared with the public.

There have been times in years past when even that much progress would have been a pipe dream.

Times when the discrepancy,hk advertising premium once discovered, would never have seen a ray of public sunshine, but rather would have been put into a corner or collard pot to collect dust in the dark.

The root of the problem with the gift card program is one that will show itself in the RESTORE Act process as well if we are not careful.

When it came to the gift cards, too many people had their hands out for a piece of the program.

With that many fingerprints on something, the picture is bound to get muddled.

When the path of a $100 gift card from Grant A to Customer B has more switchbacks than you can shake a stick at, losing track of who gave what to whom is pro forma.

And embarrassing.

Particularly given the rabbit’s warren of entities — allegedly working on our behalf — to promote tourism in our little corner of paradise.

The gift card audit also lays bare Escambia County’s knack for making things harder than they ought to be.