Earlier this week, Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi informed city leaders that the District of Columbia has a $130 million deficit for the coming year. That means District residents and businesses will likely again be asked to pay more taxes.
What Gandhi didn’t mention is that the cost of gross mismanagement in his own office over the years far exceeds the deficit. As The Examiner’s Bill Myers and Jonetta Rose Barras reported Monday, the city is scrapping a $120 million computerized tax system that — surprise! — doesn’t work. Add the $40 million embezzled by city employees in a property tax refund scam going back years and the $1.2 million in additional expenditures to make up for the computer system’s deficiencies.
That’s $161 million lost to waste, mismanagement and fraud in Gandhi’s office alone. And we haven’t even mentioned who-knows-how-many millions of revenue left uncollected as a result of the corruption and incompetence in the office of the official once hailed as the “Golden Hammer” of District government.
Accenture’s Integrated Tax System was supposed to combine the city’s individual, business and property tax records in one place to improve customer service and make it easier for management to keep tabs on all money coming in and going out. But a scathing audit of the automated system by the Washington-based Wendell Group found Accenture failed to do much of what it promised under its 1998 contract, including creating a single shared database to store individual taxpayers’ records from year to year.
Instead, ITS creates separate files for every individual and business tax collected eachyear and can’t even generate corrected property bills to reflect the most recent payments. Such records often must be typed manually by Office of Tax and Revenue employees. Auditors also found that the limit of system-generated ID numbers had already been exceeded and Social Security numbers can’t be validated. Accenture has created a $120 million online version of the boxes of disorganized paper receipts Gandhi found when he took over OTR in 1997.
“The overriding characteristic of the ITS system implementation is that of failure,” the auditors wrote. Accenture bears “a greater degree of responsibility,” the auditors said, but Gandhi is the official responsible. As Barras has reported, Gandhi wants another $5
million to fix a mess that should never have happened in the first place. City taxpayers may be forgiven for thinking the time has come to give Gandhi a gold watch and say goodbye.
