A speaking engagement with Brett Favre, vehicles, and concert tickets were among the questionable purchases made in Mississippi with funding from a federal welfare program.
The Mississippi state auditor found that $94 million, or roughly 90%, of the funding given to the state through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program in the past three years was missing or used to pay for questionable expenditures. The TANF program was intended to fund nonprofit organizations or state programs that address poverty. Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the nation.
The TANF audit was ordered as part of a larger investigation into the Mississippi Department of Human Services and its former director, John Davis, and was released on Monday. Davis was arrested in February for his role in the spending decisions. Five others, including the head of a nonprofit organization, have been charged. All have pleaded not guilty.
“This completed audit of DHS for the previous year shows the most egregious misspending my staff have seen in their careers at the Office of the State Auditor,” State Auditor Shad White said after releasing his report. “When you read this one-hundred-plus page audit, you will see that, if there was a way to misspend money, it seems DHS leadership or their grantees thought of it and tried it.”
Funding from the TANF program was used to pay $1.1 million to a nonprofit organization connected to former NFL quarterback Favre for a speaking engagement of which Favre never attended. Checks were cut to the family of Ted DiBiase, a former professional wrestler known as the “Million Dollar Man.” Some of the money went to football tickets, concerts, and a fitness program for the state’s lawmakers. White said it was unlikely that Favre, DiBiase, or other recipients knew that the federal money was being misused.
In addition to those extravagant purchases, funding was “misspent, converted to personal use, spent on family members and friends of staffers and grantees or wasted.”
States are responsible for deciding where money from the TANF program is spent. According to a report from ThinkProgress, 167 of the 11,700 Mississippi families that applied for a TANF grant in 2016 were approved.
The state is working with federal prosecutors on its criminal investigation.
