At this moment, if someone wants to run for the USCF Executive Board, all he / she basically has to do is pay a fee of $250 and get 30 random USCF members over the age of 16 to sign his / her nomination form.

This is why we get some of the most unqualified candidates with no business experience or records of success. This is one of the major reasons why the USCF has so many problems with unqualified board members and as the result of this, the USCF lost money in 9 of the last 11 years as well as losing so many sponsors, volunteers, supporters and members.

If this candidate gets elected, the USCF has to reimburse his / her expenses to attend board meetings in the following 4 years. This can mean thousands of dollars each year. This is costly to the USCF and we are not getting qualified candidates.

What I would like to see is to have this fee raise to $5,000. Then the USCF can use this $5,000 to reimburse the expenses of the elected board members for those 4 years. Candidates who do not get elected do not get a refund.

This way, there would be little or no out of pocket costs to the USCF and chances are, we would get much more qualified or much more successful candidates.

In addition, Paul Truong suggested last August requiring every candidate / board member to supply a verifiable resume. It would not be published to the public but the ED or his assistant should verify all information, including criminal records.

His proposal was rejected by the USCF President Bill Goichberg. However, I think we should revisit this issue.

Shouldn’t we do everything possible to protect the integrity of the USCF, an organization with 84,000+ members? Shouldn’t we do more to protect our 40,000+ young members?

What do you think? I am just tossing out ideas to improve the quality of the Executive Board. Do you have other ideas to improve the quality of board members?

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Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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