Helen's major accounting mistake

From the NY Times:

It’s one thing, in the heat of a campaign, to overlook a taxi receipt buried in the back of a wallet. But how does an elected official who has run several six-figure campaigns in New York fail to include her campaign’s largest bill on expense reports filed at the time of her last race?

Eleven bills totaling $101,963 have come back to haunt Helen Sears, a thrice-elected councilwoman from Queens who was defeated in September by Daniel P. Dromm in a three-way Democratic primary.

Four of the bills, including the largest, went to pay Ms. Sears’s longtime political strategists at the Parkside Group. By law, those four bills should have been disclosed to regulators no later than one week after the Sept. 15 primary. But public records show they were not reported to the Campaign Finance Board until Jan. 15, months after Ms. Sears had left the race.

These previously unreported transactions, including four from the throes of last year’s campaign, surfaced in the campaign report that Helen Sears submitted to regulators in January.

Ms. Sears, who is 80, said she did not know why the bills were overlooked, and would have to look into the matter. "You’re asking me a question I can’t answer," she said, adding that her campaigns “have always been in compliance.”

Her son Todd, who was paid $18,400 by the campaign to serve as his mother’s treasurer and to handle compliance, was also puzzled. "As far as the Campaign Finance Board is concerned, I’m not in violation of anything," he said. He noted that the board’s preliminary audit did not cite the campaign for tardiness, though he and the board declined to release a copy of that audit.