I suppose I could have taken a more professorial approach to the new Elway Poll in which 71 percent of respondents say that our $5 billion state budget gap can be closed by eliminating “waste and fraud.” But it was past midnight, so I just decided to call the majority of Washington voters a bunch of total fucking idiots, and call it night.
But given the lively debate in the comment thread, and a good night’s sleep, I thought I’d take a moment to follow up on my rant with one particular datapoint: the amount of “waste and fraud” State Auditor Brian Sonntag claims to have uncovered over five years of conducting performance audits:
– We’ve conducted nearly 30 performance audits of state and local governments.
– Through June 2009, our audits identified potential savings and revenue of $285 million over five years.
– Through June 2009, state and local governments had fully or partially instituted 86 percent of our recommendations.
Now, I’m not a big fan of Sonntag and the way he has wielded performance audits as a political weapon, but assuming his numbers can be trusted, what’s that come to… maybe $285 million worth of potential savings uncovered over five years of audits, with the bulk of that already achieved? That’s real money, sure, but it amounts to only a tiny fraction of our $31 billion General Fund budget, and would make only a small dent in the coming biennium’s projected $5 billion shortfall.
And these audits don’t come free, nor do enacting the recommendations they propose. In fact, as Roger Valdez explains on Crosscut (yes… I’m linking to Crosscut), our obsession with trying to find wasteful spending in government can actually lead to more waste and inefficiency.
Looking for “waste and fraud” (and apparently, grandstanding about his findings) is Sonntag’s job, and he’s spent tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money over five years doing it. And this is all he’s come up with.
So those of you who insist that “waste and fraud” is the primary culprit behind our budget crisis, if you don’t like my number, you might want to put up some actual numbers of your own.
It might have been said, but c’mon. “Waste” to many taxpayers is not “stock room dude dropped a box of pens behind the printer and no one noticed and they ordered more”. It’s “resurfacing roads I don’t drive on”, “funding after-school stuff when I don’t have kids”, it’s “removing invasive species from our parks and byways”.
“Waste” is just “shit I don’t agree with the state doing”.
well this latest audit cost +/-10 million and had a return of +/-280 million. Anybody else have an idea that has a 25:1 return on investment?
If a 10 million dollar audit finds 280 million then does a 100 million dollar audit/investigation find 2.8 billion? I’m not saying it would, but if it did then our budget problems wouldn’t seem quite so daunting would they?
@52 – right… and a 1 billion dollar audit might yield 2.8 trillion dollars in savings and we can all buy ponies and new chaps with gold braiding. Honestly, engage your brain before you type this stuff.
founder @52,
This was the result of 30 audits over five years, that cost over $50 million combined (and that’s just the cost of the auditors, and doesn’t count the cost incurred to the participating agencies), and they found potentially $280 million of savings that might be achieved over the next five years. We have yet to run a performance audit on performance audits to determine their ROI.
So your math is bullshit, as is your assumption that there wouldn’t be diminished returns on an increased investment in auditing.
Let’s put farm exemptions up for a vote of the people with a required 2/3 majority!
Sounds like a plan!
@54 i clearly stated that i wasn’t saying that those numbers would extrapolate out. Even if we assume your numbers thats still HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in the black. Teachers are about to have their pensions cut. We are going to lose the smaller class size initiave. State tuition is going to go up by double-digit %s and we are not wanting to reduce the amount of wasteful spending why?
What is the reason for ingnoring government waste when educational programs are on the chopping block?
How many more stories like these do you need to read before you realize that that we are throwing away what could be teachers’ salaries on BS?:
http://news.opb.org/article/21240-washin…
http://www.king5.com/news/investigators/…
http://news.opb.org/article/washington-w…
Gee, SROTU @19, you mean like this? The “Office of Financial Management Personnel Detail Report” that is made publicly available on a State web site? Is that the kind of “audit” you were thinking of? Because it took me about 4.3 seconds of Googling to find it. So who do you think would make a better “auditor,” you or I?
56- Your links show no fraud or waste, per se. The first points more toward availability of bank services in poor neighborhoods than waste – and a law prohibiting banks from charging ATM fees to EBT cards would solve the problem.
The next two links show possible poor judgment and human nature, nothing more. Do some use their benefits unwisely? absolutely. Do people who work for a living sometimes make poor choices about how to spend their wages? Yes. One does not deserve more privacy than the other based on their economic bracket.
Try again, or better yet, don’t. I don’t know how many more ways you can lose this argument, and I no longer care.
Flounder, all I can say is that you must think the State Auditor is an incompetent moron. (I agree with you, but for different reasons. For one, he claims as his first “strategic goal” to “Broaden citizens’ understanding of the role of the State Auditor,” i.e., grandstand.)
Be that as it may. Here’s what the State Auditor says about fraud:
36 cases! In the state and every local government of the state (there are hundreds of them)! Nearly one million dollars! Every year!
But you, with your vast knowledge of state and local government, are convinced that there are billions out there that the State Auditor and his team are just too stupid or incompetent to find. Well, the State Auditor is an elected position. Maybe you should run?
I don’t think it’s worth debating with a person who imagines that “waste and fraud” are just “money left on the table” instead of things that take time and money (money! the cost of eliminating these things is not just the cost of the audits, you know) to root out, and who seems to have no notion of diminishing returns. In flounder’s world eliminating waste and fraud is as simple as breaking out a magnifying glass and reading a balance sheet through it, or walking into a room full of underperforming employees and shouting “AHA! You’re all fired!” I don’t think it’s worth time or the dignity you’re affording him by attempting to discuss the issue at his level, because there is an unbridgeable gap between that simplistic “just go eliminate waste” mindset and the thinking of anybody who has ever worked with a large budget or managed a complex system or had to allocate limited resources to a complex array of problems.
@59 When did i say billions? The audit that goldy cited found hundreds of millions. Let that sink in – HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS!
That is maybe 1/20th of what is needed. Sure that was spread over 5 years and most of those innefficiencies have since been corrected, but we won’t know how much more waste is out there until we look. I’m guessing that 40 million a year that was being wasted existed before we started looking for it. How long? 10 years? 20 years?
Even if the waste was only there for 10 years prior to the audit discovering it – you are still looking at maybe a half of a billion dollars. Again 15 years and a half a billion dollars won’t cover an anual 5 billion dollar shortfall, but it’s not the “drop in the bucket” that you seem to believe it is.
It’s something. It’s a lot of money.
What is your plan for finding an extra few hundred million?
I mean besides Gregoire’s plan of cutting – museum funding, education funding, parks funding, higher education funding, cutting the class size initiative etc etc
I mean all those things are really fun to do, but let’s say for arguments’ sake that we wanted to try and mitigate the damage – how do you propose to find a couple hundred million to help absorb some of the pain?
@61: Flounder! What makes you think no one is looking? The whole point is, the entire State Auditor’s office IS looking. They employ hundreds and spend millions. Visit their web site. Read their reports. Do you notice them missing anything? So why are you convinced that there’s more that they’re not finding? You just don’t make ANY sense.
@60 I’m not saying that i should be put in charge of further audits and investigations, but if the people that are doing them are finding hundreds of millions in waste and even NPR can find several million why are we not investing in something that actually has a return on investment?
I also clearly stated in my question (yes there was a ?) that i didn’t know what the ROI on a larger audit and or investigation would be, but there is obviously some if they were able to identify 40 million a year in inefficiencies.
I’m proposing that we try to mitigate the pain of the coming budget by not allowing waste, abuse and inefficiencies to continue.
Since you guys know so much and have such a clear insight into state government what’s your big idea? There aren’t going to be any new taxes to pay for the gap. So have you just resigned yourselves to the cuts? Because as much as i’ve heard about waste being a drop in the bucket i haven’t heard, but one suggestion for actually doing something about it.
That one suggestion was that we move state employees off pension and onto a 401k. I forget who made that suggestion so i can’t attribute it to any individual, but suffice to say – i’m hearing a lot of poo pooing but nothing in the way of solutions or even mitigations.
@61 because NPR is finding millions in waste when investigating waste is not their primary job function. If a liberal radio station is finding millions in waste with a small investigation…I have to believe there is more to find.
And that my friend is why i believe there is more to find. If that does not make sense…then your conception of reality is rose colored indeed.
that was supposed to be @62
@58 you can spend your own money any way you like but when you are spending welfare money on titty clubs, liqour and doubling down that is a problem.
LOL @NPR=liberal
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
I know nothing about state budgets. I cannot force my mind to study them. But I get anecdotally why people could think that eliminating waste and fraud would save tons of money. Please interpret this post as polite questioning.
First off, why should I trust the audits? We elected a city council that is pushing for a tunnel that is nothing more than a corrupt pay-out to contractors. We voted for the monorail five times? We got the light rail specifically because it serves fewer people less effectively and for more money.
My hometown spent a hundred of thousands of taxpayer dollars on a park that turns into a mud pit every time it rains. It’s only safe to walk through in late August. Another park has a zig-zag sidewalk through it that renders all the green space unusable.
None of these projects would show up on an audit as fraud or waste. But there’s a contractor out there that paid for a new yacht with what they made off of tax dollars. And I’m sure the contractor set aside some of the money for campaign spending.
That’s what I think at least some of the the people polled think of when they think of waste and fraud. They think of the contractors that elect the officials, write the laws, get the contracts, and build the roads or whatever and reap huge profits. None of the waste and fraud is going to come up in an official investigation because it’s in the context of the law which has been written by the people defrauding the public. Waste and fraud is part of the law.
This isn’t a statement about the nature of government, it’s one about our government right now. It is institutionally corrupted by commerce.
@13, as a former fed, accountability measures were once the bane of my existence. Here I am trying to complete multiple cases, all on tight deadlines, and congressman number 1 asshole wants me to fill out a stack of papers detailing how I did routine tasks for the last 3 years. I kid you not, I was put in charge of a year-long project to monitor when technology problems were reported in my office…AND I WAS AN INTERNATIONAL TRADE SPECIALIST IN UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES! We also had people who were assigned as “property custodians”…other trade and industry and regional economics specialists who had to keep track of people’s computer monitors when they moved into a new cube. On top of the administrative bullshit, we regularly had to calculate our own case loads and the speed with which we handled them, how often we extended deadlines, how many memos we issued in certain time frames, on and on and on. At the conclusion of these “audits,” they would ask us what we thought could be done to improve the task. Simple, common sense solutions like getting an efax system, integrating all of our databases into the same systems (instead of having one in access, six in lotus, and ten more in proprietary programs developed under multibillion dollar contracts to private corporations), and mandating the use of efficient review processes(I.e., requiring stakeholders to review documents and provide comments through email instead of expecting me to drop what I’m doing, print them a copy, walk it down to their office, stop again later, pick it up, and spend an hour trying to decypher their chicken scratch and incessant need to use editing language that hasn’t been touched by a college professor since 1992) were tossed by the wayside, but damn if each “audit” didn’t find the need for more proprietary software or, wait for it, even more “audits.”
I asked for a new computer at my job 2 weeks ago…exactly what I wanted arrived today. I asked for access to the efax from home, and got it in one day flat. I asked to try out that “cleared traveler” thing, and was enrolled as soon as I could be. Godd I love only having one set of bosses with the same goals to answer to…they just want me to do what is expected of me, and don’t feel the need to constantly tell me I’m doing it wrong, ESPECIALLY when most managers (private sector managers and politicians alike) don’t know how to do their underlings jobs.
@68 we didn’t quit when the germans bombed pearl harbor…flounder out
Damn, I may have gotten in on this conversation a little too late.
Flounder,
I don’t think anyone here is saying that we should ignore waste. Nobody is OK with hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and everyone would love to see a government with $0 waste if that were possible. Regardless of whether it’s 20% or .2% ridding government of waste is an admirable goal. You mentioned earlier that if you could spend $1000 to eliminate $5000 worth of waste that you would. I’m sure everyone here would agree with you on that.
What if you had to spend $5000 to eliminate $1000 worth of waste. What’s been pointed out here a few times is that in many of these cases it will cost more to eliminate the waste than the waste we’re eliminating, often dramatically more as in the earlier LA welfare case. Your earlier, rather extreme, example on rape is silly. In theory at least we’ll spend almost any amount of money to prevent rape and we don’t see a direct financial payout for doing it. For the most part we’re ok with that. When it comes to money though spending more to save money than the money you’ve saved is not rational. Sure, it would be great to snag every welfare fraud. Sure, it would be great to eliminate every inefficiency in the system. In reality though it’s often not worth the investment because the investment is greater than the return.
Yes, it would be great to eliminate the $128 million in waste but if it costs $200 million to find and eliminate it then it would be silly to do it.