D.C. City Administrator Dan Tangherlini warned the D.C. Council on Tuesday that overburdening District employees with tiers of bureaucracy risks opening the door to abuse by enterprising thieves.
In the wake of the largest corruption scandal in city history, Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration is focusing on stronger oversight, performance assessment and auditing, Tangherlini told the government operations committee, chaired by Councilwoman Carol Schwartz. But too many layers of review “reduce accountability and obscure transparency,” he said.
“The natural tendency after an event of this sort is to layer existing processes with additional layers of review or approval,” Tangherlini said. “Among the lessons we learned from the recent events is that a small group of committed individuals can thwart these processes and can actually capitalize on processes with too many layers of review.”
Immediately after the “revelation” that at least $20 million had allegedly been stolen by a pair of employees in the Office of Tax and Revenue, Tangherlini asked Fenty’s cabinet to list its top-five concerns, he said. Among the responses: overtime abuse, grant management, procurement and contract oversight.
“Managers need to ask questions, involve themselves in process review, and design and create a culture of ownership and responsibility in their agencies,” Tangherlini said.
Mary Levy, director of the public reform project with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, agreed that compounding rules can be so “debilitating” that employees end up working around them.
“I don’t see how having more people signing off in and of itself just opens the door to fraud, because there are more eyes,” Levy said. “However, every time we have some kind of crisis or scandal, we react by imposing more rules, and the whole system has become so complicated that if people follow all the rules, they’re paralyzed.”
Now is an “opportune time to look at all the procedures in the government, to make sure we have preventing processes in place to keep this thing from happening in other areas of our government, or if it is happening, God forbid, to stop it,” Schwartz said.
