With each passing month during the course of the forensic audit of the Ocean Pines Association’s ledgers, speculating about what the investigation might reveal became almost a parlor game amongst a fair number of property owners.

Those would be the ones who, for various reasons, keep a close eye on the association’s management and board of directors. Some do it because they have their own opinions on how the OPA should be run, some are looking out for their own interests, and still others do it because they like to be engaged in community affairs.

Regardless of their reasons, however, they could only wait and wonder as this investigative foray into the association’s finances took place, by necessity, out of view.

Forensic accounting, which is like picking out and examining all the numerical fishbones in a year’s total catch, is not a spectator sport, even if this one was initiated following cries of foul, theft and malfeasance.

Now, however, property owners can see for themselves what the accounting specialists from Gross, Mendelsohn & Associates found during the Baltimore firm’s effort to determine whether any of the allegations were true.

The board of directors is not just following the community information requirements of the Maryland Homeowners Association Act in making the audit report available to property owners, the directors seem almost eager to get these documents before their constituents.

To their credit, they have stipulated that what property owners will see are the warts-and-all findings of the audit, with no redactions and names named.

Given all the rumors and guessing games that preceded the audit’s completion, that’s how it should be, since any suggestion that anyone or anything received the White-Out treatment would re-ignite the controversy that this audit was designed to end.