It is no secret in the Kimberley that some of our Aboriginal corporations are being investigated.

Mismanagement, poor records and outright fraud are all levelled as possible charges.

In fact two cases are presently before the courts and cannot be discussed for this reason.

However, one thing seems to be apparent in at lease two of the cases we are aware of and that is that the corporations did not check references of potential employees before hiring them.

We do not suggest that any of these employees had criminal records.

However, a simple telephone call to former employers in at least two cases would have unearthed that the people the corporations were about to employ were not desirable.

Far from it.

A document leaked to the Kimberley Echo last week has to do with the financial woes of an interstate Aboriginal community.

It went from being more than one million dollars in the black in the year 2000 to owing more than a million a year later.

The chief executive officer had ordered pay increases for senior staff, including $23,000 extra for himself.

He was sacked last year.

We believe the same man now holds a similar position with an Aboriginal corporation in the East Kimberley.

It is almost as if there is a network of these people who move from one disaster to orchestrating the next.

Who suffers?

Obviously all the Aboriginal people involved with the corporations, creditors and the taxpayer.

ATSIC does not take the blame and its public relations officer Liz Drew told the Kimberley Echo last week that it was the corporations' responsibility to check into the backgrounds of employees.

The Echo had offered to forward the latest documents to ATSIC.

When we asked about investigations into other local corporations, we were told to email our questions and they 'will be dealt with appropriately'.

We decided against forwarding the documents to ATSIC and instead placed them in the hands of detectives.

If there is one lesson that must be learnt from this it is that corporations must thoroughly vet their administrative staff - check their police records, their references and with ATSIC to see if they have been suspected of bad dealings in the past.

If this is not done then we will all continue to be rorted by these unscrupulous individuals.