BARNES FOUNDATION AUDIT REVEALS QUESTIONABLE PRACTICES

Two women who lived in a house owned by the Barnes Foundation without the board’s consent represented just one example of the questionable practices at the foundation during the mid-1990s, according to a long-secret investigative audit that finally was made public on Monday. The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Don Steinberg reports that the “forensic audit” was conducted in 1999 at the request of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office. It was ordered released yesterday by Montgomery County Orphans’ Court Judge Stanley Ott, who is hearing the foundation’s petition to rewrite its bylaws and move its multibillion-dollar art collection from the Philadelphia suburbs to the city proper.