If the state held errant agencies liable for misappropriated funds, wasted time and criminal behavior, how much money could taxpayers recover?
Millions of dollars. A host of Department of Legislative Services audits make that clear, including its most recent outlining potential credit card fraud, shoddy record keeping, a failure to document purchases and lost equipment at Baltimore City Community College.
So where is the taxpayer?s repo man? Where are the forensic accountants? And most importantly, where are the penalties for abusing the trust of Marylanders?
Other than the brief embarrassment a negative audit may or may not solicit from local media, miscreants? promises to remedy problems are an inadequate response.
A case in point is the BCCC employee found to have charged $81,725 during the 2004-2007 audit period for items including a digital camera, video game systems and games and DVD players allegedly given as student “prizes.”
The audit recommends the purchases be investigated and the credit card account closed and referred to the Office of the Attorney General?s Criminal Division if the purchases were fraudulent. The school?s response so far is to close the account. Can you imagine a business that would not immediately fire the person in question and seek to retrieve the money?
The list of negligence is almost endless. Remember the DLS audit earlier this year that found Morgan State University misrepresented $3.1 million of a $4.3 million request from the Board of Public Works to fund a telecommunications upgrade? Or how about the $1.8 million in expenditures the Department of Veterans Affairs could not document? Or the $1.7 million a former employee of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene stole?
And the hours and hours of porn viewed by 22 employees at the state Department of Transportation on the clock. Did the state demand those employees refund taxpayers for their wasted time? Did it revoke the appropriation to Morgan State University or demand its financial officers be fired? Or how about suing employees found to defraud taxpayers?
The least Gov. Martin O?Malley and state legislators can do is to make funding contingent on a clean audit and/or reduce funding by the amount squandered. Until these actions become standard operating procedure, state agencies will continue to be hotbeds for waste and taxpayers will be liable for inefficient and sometimes criminal management of our hard-earned dollars.
