With its $500,000 revival of Where the Wild Things Are now running at the Chicago Theatre, Chicago Opera Theater (COT) is facing what must be the wildest financial mess in its 16-year history. The trouble appears to have developed during at least the last two years of former general manager Marc Scorca’s tenure at the organization. After a six-year stint with COT, Scorca departed last June in a blaze of glory to become executive director and CEO of OPERA America, a Washington, D.C.-based trade organization serving professional opera companies in the U.S. and Canada.
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But there was nothing glorious about the state of COT when Scorca left. Chief among the problems now facing the organization is a total of approximately $200,000 in operating deficits accumulated over the past two fiscal years, plus a bill for about $100,000 in payroll withholding taxes that were not paid during the last six months of Scorca’s tenure. Failure to make timely payroll tax payments is a federal offense. Stephen Mack, an accountant with the firm of Ernst & Young who became treasurer of COT’s board of directors last July 1, said he did not discover the payroll tax problem until he went to the COT offices in July. Scorca said he informed the board’s executive committee of the withholding tax problem last June, but that the full 42-member board did not hear of it until August.
But if accountant Land was a big improvement over his predecessor, the evidence is now hard to find. According to Scorca, Land walked into Scorca’s office last April, dropped his keys on the table, and left. (Board treasurer Mack said that so far as he knows no one on the board has seen or heard from Land since.) Scorca says that he then inspected the COT books and found them in a state of confusion. A part-time bookkeeper was brought in to begin sorting through the mess.
