Do the indictments handed down on Thursday mark the end of the Kansas Athletics Inc., ticket scandal or are we still waiting for other shoes to drop?

After an internal investigation determined that former athletic department employees had skimmed up to $5 million in Kansas University football and basketball tickets in the last five years, KU officials said they had taken all the appropriate steps to return integrity to the ticketing operation. It’s difficult to have much faith in those steps when the young woman who took over as director of ticket operations resigned her post Thursday just hours before the announcement of a grand jury indictment against her.

Also indicted were three former Kansas Athletics employees and a former consultant who had been implicated in the internal investigation. One of the investigators hired by KU said he was surprised by the indictment of Kassie Liebsch, the current ticket office director, because he’d asked her and her attorney whether Liebsch had done anything “indictable,” and was told “no.”

Unlike those who conducted the federal probe that produced the indictment, the KU investigators couldn’t subpoena witnesses or compel people to talk. That meant they pretty much had to believe whatever people told them unless they had evidence to the contrary.

It’s not a great excuse, but it’s a better excuse than the Kansas Athletics officials who put Liebsch into the ticket office job have available. It’s amazing that they would let anyone who worked in the ticket office during this mess continue in any role of responsibility after the scandal came to light. But then, these are the same officials who assigned one of Liebsch’s fellow indictees, Charlette Blubaugh, to assist the federal investigation into the situation the authorities now say she helped spearhead.

If officials had any inkling that Liebsch was involved in this matter, they should have placed her on administrative leave until the federal investigation was complete. The fact that they apparently had no clue that an indictment might be forthcoming against Liebsch is another indication of the lack of oversight and good judgment practiced by top Kansas Athletics officials.

When the internal investigation report was released in May, then-Athletic Director Lew Perkins said the ticket scandal was a “curveball” he had missed. That’s why ballparks have backstops behind home plate and why organizations that handle as much money as Kansas Athletics should have processes and procedures to make sure that the problems that aren’t caught by one person are caught by someone else.

Perkins and KU Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little pledged after the report was released that internal controls would be instituted to prevent any repeat of the ticket scam. Perhaps they have, but the fact that one of the people who now has been indicted was allowed to oversee the KU ticket office until the day that indictment was announced doesn’t give the public a lot of confidence that the situation has been handled.