“My job is to do oversight. It’s not to catch people who are stealing,” Ward 2 D.C. Councilman Jack Evans told me just days after District taxpayers learned $414,800 of their money had been stolen, according to federal officials, by an employee in the Office of Tax and Revenue. Mary Ayers-Zander used fraudulent income tax returns to route the money to her personal bank accounts. The scheme took place from 2007 through January 2011. Ironically, this was during the same period Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi was promising the mayor, council, and anyone else who would listen that he had installed system safeguards to prevent future thefts, following the $48 million embezzlement by midlevel OTR employee Harriette Walters.
So much for promises.
