Many of us have probably heard the comments of Sam Corcos on FOX, when he talked about “Ghost Contracts” of millions of dollars within the IRS budget. Moreover, just about everyone has heard about other DOGE initiatives finding millions, even billions, of dollars in waste and fraud. But while these numbers are big, I dare say that this is just scratching the surface of how much of our hard-earned money is being stolen within government. And I’m not talking about the federal government.
I’m talking about grand theft in states, counties, and even cities and towns (featured photo… Omaha, Neb.).
About 15 years ago, a lady I knew got a job working as a financial auditor in a southern city of just over 200,000 people. She ultimately worked at this job for only about four months, deciding to leave for personal reasons. But in those four months, she found some interesting things. Her job was to audit and balance just one checking account for the city, but for the life of her, she could not balance it. Moreover, she did research into previous years and found the same problem. And as she did this research, she ran into a particularly interesting item.
Every month, the city was cutting a $50 check to a company…for no services rendered. And nobody knew why.
She turned to her coworkers for help, but suddenly they became very cold and distant. She informed her supervisor, who duly took the steps to stop the flow of this measly $50 dollars. But she also informed my friend that the accounts have never balanced as long as she had been there, and that she shouldn’t waste her time trying to balance them.
So, in just a few months, my friend learned that the city’s accounts didn’t balance and that at least one fraudulent check was being cut. She later told me that she believed she had just scratched the surface regarding the latter.
What does this little tale tell us? Simple… that the corruption we are seeing currently in Washington DC goes very deep indeed, all the way into local communities across the country. One can just imagine the tens of thousands, even millions of dollars, being siphoned off in expired and fraudulent contracts at various levels of government. Indeed, this is one of the reasons (of many others) why we don’t want big government… even at the county and city level.
So, how do we deal with this? I believe at point it would literally cost thousands upon thousands of man hours to unravel this stuff and root it out. So here’s a possible solution…..
What if local government… a city or county…simply flushed all contracts, even subcontracts for various departments… at once. And then forced contractors to come back and argue for the contracts. The government entity could set up subcommittees composed of retirees who have no stake in the projects (and especially no past employment regarding the proposed contracts), who then ask contractors a key question…. “what benefit does the taxpayer get for this contract?” In addition, each contractor would be checked to see if they are actually a real, legitimate business.
For some cities, such an approach would be far too complex, so instead they could examine small segments of the budget, such as landscape management or sewer maintenance. They could check to ensure that money is going to legitimate contracts, for example.
Perhaps such an approach is too utopian, but I think we would find over a six-month period that many contracts being paid out by government entities are either fraudulent or based on expired requirements.
And if nothing else, our local politicians would see that we the people are watching them… closely. That, in and of itself, would help curtail some of the fraud we’re seeing.
Russ Rodgers has several books published on Amazon.
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