Bloomington city manager David Hales says the city has strong controls in place to detect fraud, but he says there’s no way to guarantee you can catch it.  Five former managers who worked for Central Illinois Arena Management are charged in a more than 100-count indictment accusing them of stealing more than 1 million dollars from the city over the decade the firm ran the city-owned arena. Hales said the city’s external auditors didn’t find anything wrong.

“It goes to show you can even have auditors as we found time and time again do some deep dive analysis and sometimes they don’t even detect (fraud),” Hales said.

Alderwoman Diana Hauman says the city should have had tighter controls in its contract with CIAM.

“If we could go back in time, it would have been written with different checks and balances in it,” Hauman said.

Hales adds the new arena company, VenuWorks, has more in-depth auditing. Its first manager was fired last fall for allegedly misusing a company debit card.

This story was submitted by WJBC’s Eric Stock and Howard Packowitz.