There were three, sometimes four levels of accountability for an official to surmount on his way to formal quittance (finiquito): rendering his accounts, the local audit, the review audit, and in some cases, an appeal to a higher court. As one might expect for a treasury both isolated and poor, the Florida arrangements for accountability were irregular, often unclear, and complicated by continuous changes and combinations of levels. Perhaps this is why Hoffman found that among the treasuries of the Antilles and the circum-Caribbean, the Florida treasury was outstanding for its unreliable accounts and infrequent audits. Provision had been made for appeals, or fiscal litigation, long before there was a permanent settlement on the peninsula. Only a few days after Panfilo de Narvaez landed at Tampa Bay in 1528, a royal ordinance listed the Florida treasury officials among those whose appeals were to go to the audiencia of Mexico. This disposition was repeated in 1533, when Florida was regarded as one with the western Gulf Coast province of Panuco. In more general legislation, the New Laws of 1542 specified that treasury officials in the Indies should send an annual financial summary to the accountants of the Council. The Ordinances of 1554 called for audits every three years and gave detailed procedural instructions, which were largely ignored while the crown made a short-lived experiment in Peru with a special board of accountants. In 1563 the Ordinance of the Audiencias amended audit intervals to be yearly, and the following year the procedural orders were reissued. By 1570 most Caribbean treasuries were being audited on a regular basis. [Note 12: Cedula to the governors of Florida 6/19/1586; Diego Sans de San Martin for Juan de Cevadilla 1585] The Florida treasury was an immediate exception. For the first 11 years it was hardly a treasury at all. Its books were tied in first with the personal accounts of Menendez, then with the subsidy to the Indies Fleet. When Florida received a subsidy of its own, the adelantado and his numerous nephews treated it as part of their personal funds. Auditing was done at the convenience of crown-appointed investigators, usually officials from the Fleet. One of these, Treasurer Andres de Eguino, discovered in 1569 that Steward Juan de Junco, Menendez’s earliest treasury appointee, had false scales with which he systematically cheated the king’s soldiers. Junco’s confederates at once initiated a cover-up.