This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The Economic Development Corporation of Utah, a non-profit that receives millions of taxpayer dollars annually to encourage new business in Utah, hasn't filed a tax return for five years.

The person in charge of EDCU, Jeff Edwards, says he found out about it only last October, and then only because someone outside of EDCU told him that the Internal Revenue Service had cancelled its tax-exempt status for failing to file.

And that happened two years earlier.

Edwards says as CEO he'll take the bullet for what happened. He has hired a new CFO and cleaned up its processes. And six EDCU board members, including lots of high-powered bankers, now sit on a finance committee. A legislative audit is pending, but at this point outside auditors haven't found any irregularities.

All that is well and good, but this is inexcusable. Tax filings are not a simple thing to neglect. As millions of people know first hand, when you don't file, the IRS starts asking questions. There had to be intent on someone's part to ignore the warnings. With a $3.3 million budget and a mission to deliver professionalism to industry, there is simply no way there were not people aware of this inside EDCU. That the person in charge went so long without knowing is a management fail, and a big one.

And then there's his board. It has more than 100 people on it, not including ex officio members. It includes titans of industry and finance, with virtually all big Utah businesses represented. And 60 of those board members are public representatives, including most of the mayors in Salt Lake County.

That's not a board. That's a list of names.

Even the board's executive committee has 30 people. There's a simple principle in situations like this. The larger the board, the less involved board members are and the more they rely on staff to create their understanding.

This is another problematic quasi-governmental situation for our "best managed" state. The most celebrated case is the Utah Transit Authority, but we've also seen trouble recently from the Utah Communications Authority, which whiffed on a $1 million embezzlement. There appears to be too much disconnect between the people appointed to these oversight boards and the actual operations they oversee.

But EDCU's situation potentially is even dicier. Much of the work they do involves delicate negotiations with private entities, which makes government transparency more difficult. If we can't trust EDCU to do something as basic as filing tax returns, what might it be doing to fudge things elsewhere?

The legislative audit of EDCU is an absolute necessity, and it should run deep. Reassurances of the people who missed this to begin with are meaningless at this point.