Perhaps in later years the "rules " changed.
Probably with the advent of 'NonPAs'? Or was it the Navy food fraud scandal (of about those times) which threw the spotlight on such things?
Whilst serving at one particular base, I was volunteered to be Oi/c station gliding club. This was
supposed to involve simply keeping an eye on things with no requirement to be involved in the financial side....
Of course that's not the way it ended up - I had to check our books with some minor Blunty every month. We had to hit our target 'profit' within something like ±0.5%. Which we always did.
During a session in the bar following my dining-out, said Blunty came up to me and told me how pleased he'd been with the performance of our club and wished that every other club ran its finances so well....
"You obviously don't know about the balance tank", I told him....
"What's that?"
"Every month when I tot up the figures and count the cash, I work out how we did relative to a number in the range you allow us. If we're over, the extra goes into a big, black tin in my office. If we're under, I raid the tin for the necessary amount".
"YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!"
"Well, it keeps your books straight, no-one makes anything out of it - so what's the problem? If the tin gets a bit heavy, we have a party and partly subsidise it; if it gets too light, we review the fees....."
It never did get light. Usually because anything left over from a BYOB party would be sold over the bar at later parties.
Blunties never really did fathom out the number of ways we aircrew could find to cope with inconvenient administrivial nonsense in a pragmatic manner!
But that was before computers.....
