Gee, What Happened?

We'll give you three guesses. And the first two don't count:

• Nearly 1,400 city stickers are “missing” and unaccounted for — at a potential loss to Chicago taxpayers of $134,325 — because of lax internal controls and sloppy record-keeping at a satellite city clerk's office where residents paid $3.9 million last year to purchase city stickers, passports and residential parking permits and dog licenses, a new audit shows.

  City Clerk Miguel del Valle requested the audit in 2006 and insisted that the deficiencies identified by Inspector General Joe Ferguson have since been corrected by an electronic cashiering system that “virtually eliminates the chance for any error in the cashiering and selling of city stickers.” The audit covered a 2 1/2 year period that started before del Valle took office in late 2006. It continued through 2008.

Nice to see they may have fixed it. But what happened prior to the audit?

• As for the 1,380 stickers described as “missing” and unaccounted for during the year-long period ending on June 30, 2008, the clerk’s office believes there’s a perfectly legitimate explanation for it that has nothing to do with theft, skimming or black-market sales.

And we have some lovely swamp land in Florida to sell you, along with a bridge (slightly used) in Brooklyn.