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.
In my humble opinion, some of Dan’s best advice comes on the heels of a few drinks or a vicodin, and I’d say your “tired slogging” is just the same: To the point and a little snarky, with swearing. And fuck is a good, solid word that’s stood the test of time…you could do worse.
Thank you. Been saying this for years.
Tim Eyman provided Brian Sonntag an endless supply of money to harrass (I mean, “hire private accounting firms for millions of dollars to conduct performance audits on”) government agencies, to the great delight of the media, who aren’t forced to employ costly investigative reporters.
The results for anyone who knows these agencies are: 10% discovery of actual bad practices, 90% shaking head at stupdity of auditors who have no fucking clue what they’re talking about. Most of the recommendations have nothing to do with either waste, fraud or efficiency, and a significant portion of them are just policy differences that the State Auditor has no business sticking his nose into. Some of the recommendations are actually costly or counterproductive.
Brian Sonntag loves to see his name in the paper, and the sooner we can dislodge him from his semi-permanent position and employ a real state auditor, the better we all will be.
I’d guess most of those 71% could defend their opinion by siting any program not directly benefiting them as individuals as “waste.”
They’re idiots to believe that of course, just not idiots in the way the way it’s being explained.
Exactly Goldy. The onus is on those claiming there is massive waste and fraud to put up or shut up. Identify it. And identify enough of it that it actually comes to more than a fraction of a percent of the overall budget.
In other words, less than the money wasted on the Deeply Boring Tunnel “solution” even WITHOUT inevitable cost overruns.
So we could get rid of the “auditors” and just cancel the Billionaires Tunnel and build either the rebuilt Viaduct or the Surface Plus Transit and we’d have MORE revenue, then?
Cause when you’re balancing a budget – kind of like the feds (*cough* IraqIranAfghanistan *cough*) – you look for the Big Wasteful Elephant in the room. Not the teeny tiny mouse.
I am a fan of your posts written around closing time. Anthony does them well also.
And please quit referring to yourself in the third person in your headlines. Or bring back “This Reporter”, why don’t you?
gus @7,
The referring to myself in the third person in the headline is a convention that evolved over time at HA. I dunno why.
Perhaps it doesn’t translate well to Slog. We’ll see.
or he could wear a cape. it adds an aura.
Will @9,
Everybody at the Stranger wears a cape these days. I need an affectation that stands out.
“Accountability” seems like a popular buzz word for both the Ds and Rs, but don’t forget that accountability isn’t free. Take a functioning agency. Cut its budget. Then impose a bunch of requirements to make it more “accountable”. The already overworked staff now has to divert its attention to fulfilling the accountability requirements. Sounds like a recipe for failure, and in the case of the Rs, I think this is deliberate. The Ds are just dumb.
@8, no, if it’s a pizzazz thing by all means keep it. I didn’t know.
$285,000,000 x .14 = $39,900,000/5 years = $7,980,000 remaining state government waste & fraud/year.
7,980,000/5,000,000,000 = 0.160% of the budget deficit.
7,980,000/31,000,000,000 = 0.026% of the general fund budget.
ARMED REVOLUTION!
But, but…. where did all the money go?
It must be fraud and waste.
I mean the state has a budget shortfall, right?
Decreased revenue stream? What’s that?
@13 Your math may be overly simplistic.
While I couldn’t agree more that this is the most important less than a full percentage point of the budget, you do have to consider that there will probably be some costs associated with eliminating this waste, such that we’ll probably only recapture some small percentage of a percentage.
TO THE WALLS!
Hey, I know, let’s slash funding for mental health services! Those people will just have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and cutting their funding certainly won’t affect me!
@10 hmmm. How about a crown? I seem to recall a lot of superheroes used to wear those. Or a diamond or gem encrusted circlet around your weighty brow … it’s like a sweatband for heroes to manage their long flowing locks.
Great to have you on Slog, Goldy.
Here’s my idea of how to do an audit.
Clearly identify, on a public website, any individual or individual in an organization, who is being paid more than $100,000 in a single fiscal year by the State, City or Local Government.
I mean, that’s what it all comes down to. Which person is collecting the money? Even if it’s a “needed project” do we have to pay $1Million to a “senior manager”?
Somehow, somewhere, $5 billion is getting spent.
That means that in toto, $5 billion is now in someone else’s pockets than the taxpayers.
Who are they?
If you do those numbers in Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Greece, or Portugal, you’ll find the missing money are the corporations that aren’t paying taxes, legally or illegally.
We’ve had to cut about $3 billion over the last few years, and we have to cut about $5 billion for the next few years. That’s $8 billion. So let’s say that the state employees Supreme Ruler is claiming are responsible for this mess about make $150,000 a year. According to my shaky arithmetic, that would be about 53,333 state employees making $150,000 a year.
So find them, Supreme Ruler, and let us know who they are.
“Waste and fraud” are just another in a long list of code-words designed to get vulnerable WASPs extremely upset about being forced to give their money to non-WASPs, and, presumably, to deadbeat WASPs; the goal being to manipulate them to vote for representatives of the Grand Old Party – who will of course immediately turn around and rob said voters blind. Much of the nation’s political discourse is expertly crafted around this topic by professionals who are paid a considerable amount of money to keep these voters continuously riled up.
How much accelerated depreciation do BIAW companies do every year … hmmm.
Adds up, doesn’t it.
Here’s the conservatives thinking:
“We must eliminate ALL needles from the haystacks. What’s that? It will take billions just to find all the needles? Then we must eliminate all haystacks!”
Yayyyy Goldy.
This is gonna be fun!
It does not seem to be available online, but many years ago Harper’s ran a piece on investigating welfare fraud in LA (at the time welfare fraud was the meme of the day and finding “welfare queens” was going to balance the budget).
I forget the numbers, but they spent millions of dollars in staff time and installing whiz-bang computers and software. They found handfuls of cases. The one thing I remember was that the cost to identify each case was just over $110,000. At that time the average yearly benefit was well below $10,000. So they lost about $100,000 per case identifying waste and fraud.
I guess since we are already 5 billion in debt no need in worrying about hundreds of millions being stolen from taxpayers.
@27: see my post @13 if you are math-challenged. you are correct, we don’t need to worry about it, because “hundreds of millions” AREN’T being stolen from taxpayers.
@28:
You have to remember that for people like @27 “hundreds of millions being stolen from taxpayers” = “hundreds of millions spent on things I don’t like and don’t personally benefit from”.
285 million over 5 years qualifies as hundreds of millions. Just because only 14% of that is continuing to be pilfered doesn’t mean that those hundreds of millions weren’t already stolen. Are we not supposed to care about the 8 million continuing to be taken year after year? Are we going to ignore the new theft and waste that will continue to crop up? You can try to mitigate the thievery as much as you like (although i can’t understand why), but taxpayers are being constantly fleeced and saying it’s piss in the ocean just excuses the crooks that are robbing every tax-paying citizen in the state.
It’s like saying it’s ok to steal $10 from a millionaire because he won’t hardly notice the difference. The apathy about this might be more disturbing than the theft itself.
@30: reading/math comprehension fail. Sonntag’s audits have “identified potential savings and revenue of $285 million over five years.”
No mention of fraud. Waste maybe. Fraud no. If the had found fraud we’d be reading about it in the news.
You’re like those people who worry about earmarks, when they’re a tiny fraction of the overall debt.
@29 i don’t have children and i don’t complain about education funding even though it takes up more than %50 of the total state budget. I don’t complain about Medicaid even though it costs the state billions and neither i nor any of my family receive those benefits. So your argument is baseless and arrogant. I must be a self-centered prick because i want accountability for my tax dollars and would prefer to not subsidize the lazy and the crooks of the world.
Your complacency is what allows the corruption to happen in the first place.
flounder @32:
Pointing out that there are bigger fish to fry is not the same thing as complacency. Complaining about waste and fraud right now is equivalent to complaining that there’s a leak in the ceiling of your cabin on the Titanic as the vessel lurches underwater.
@31 jerk win – comprehension fail. They did a five year audit and over the course of those five years they found a wasted 285 million. Just because they weren’t looking prior to 2005 doesn’t mean that the waste wasn’t there. If i steal from you and you don’t realize it that doesn’t absolve me of the crime.
I never used the word fraud. You did though and i wouldn’t disagree with that characterization. When it comes to government wasting tax dollars it is tantamount to thievery. The government has a responsibility to maximize every tax dollar it collects and every time it fails to do so it is to the detriment of every tax-paying citizen.
@34 “The government has a responsibility to maximize every tax dollar it collects and every time it fails to do so it is to the detriment of every tax-paying citizen.”
Granting your larger point without digressing into the oversimplification, the government should not waste our money trying to stamp out 100% of “waste”. Instead, we need to balance the costs of prevention against the actual loss, giving due consideration to possible recovery and deterrence value. It is absurd to argue that we can eliminate all waste or that recognizing that fact is condoning waste and that balancing towards reasonable levels is tantamount to inviting further waste.
@34,
No! That is NOT true and it shows you’re not even paying attention!
The government must not “maximize” every tax dollar, it must spend every tax dollar in the most efficient way possible. Those are NOT the same things!
You are arguing that corruption and fraud MUST be eliminated entirely or else your money is being wasted and government isn’t doing its job and yadda yadda yadda…
Corruption and waste and fraud CANNOT be eliminated. Let me repeat:
Corruption and waste and fraud CANNOT BE ELIMINATED.
EVER!
The more you spend in the futile effort to weed out every last crook, the less returns you get on your investment. You are arguing that if even ONE crook remains, it is worth spending the entire GDP to weed him out, and anything less than that is to turn a blind eye to thievery, to enable these crooks to steal your hard earned dollars. So if you can’t catch the crooks by spending every last dollar, you want to just do away with it ALL. Throw the baby out with the bathwater, cut off the head in order to cure the headache, to ensure that not one penny is given to crooks. Thousands may suffer and die, yes, but not one crook will drink a drop of whisky on your watch. That kind of extremism has no place in society.
You see the world as all good or all evil and it’s just not that way. Wake up and see the real world. Corruption cannot be eliminated. You must accept that fact. Once you accept it, then government can work towards the best trade off of lowest corruption with greatest return.
I don’t think it’s possible to convince people who generalize welfare/unemployment/workman’s comp recipients as “lazy” and criminal. It’s a really good distraction that can be used by the very well-off to get attention off of them and their historically low marginal tax rates, the wars fought in their interests, and the economic system gamed to maximize their profit–usually at tax payer expense! But yes, by all means, keep feeling disgust for the imagined mass of lazy pieces of shit: able but unwilling people.
flounder @34,
No, you don’t understand what a performance audit is. It’s not an audit of the books (the Auditor’s office does that as well), but rather, an audit of procedures to try to find and recommend increased efficiencies. But — and this is important — just because the audit recommends changes that might save money, doesn’t mean this changes will produce the savings anticipated.
And it’s attitudes like yours that actually make performance audits harder to conduct, because it turns them into an adversarial process used to bash public employees as wasteful and fraudulent.
But all that is beside the point. The point is, even at the Auditor’s most optimistic projections, he only found $285 million of savings over five years… a tiny fraction of the budget gap.
i think a lot of you believe that you have to ignore a crime because of a sad reality.
Imagine ignoring rape because people get cancer and die. The two have nothing to do with each other.
Yes there is a +/-5 billion dollar shortfall that is going to cause painful cuts to education, state employee benefits and employee health care. That is going to happen…accept it…It is the cancer in this analogy.
There is also hundreds of millions of dollars in government waste that is a crime against tax-payers…That is your rape
Ignoring the rape isn’t going to make the cancer go away.
Sure it’s a simplistic analogy, but it seems like a lot of you don’t get that fighting government corruption is good for everybody and doing so doesn’t mean that you have to ignore the brutal cuts that ARE going to happen whether you deal with the waste or not. It’s not an either or. We have to make the budget cuts. Sure it’s going to suck but it’s going to happen but that doesn’t mean we cant try to save a few hundred million by continuing to combat waste.
@39,
You completely left out raising taxes.
flounder @39,
Okay, let me try to put this a different way.
Let’s say you’re a government employee. You’ve been doing your job for a number of years, when all of a sudden you have an idea for changing procedures that could save your agency hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Do we congratulate this employee for his innovation, or do we castigate, and perhaps even fire him, for having unnecessarily wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars a year–you know, “raping” taxpayers–during his tenure?
You seem to be advocating the latter. And that attitude is counterproductive.
@39 No. It is nothing like rape and I nonetheless hope you continue to be privileged enough not to find out exactly how grossly incorrect your analogy is.
Government waste is much more like a bunch of leaky faucets. Some need replacing, some need a little tightening and some you just keep an eye on because the loss isn’t worth the fix. Yes, we could theoretically lose a veritable flood of money, but when you look at the numbers, it’s just a drop in the bucket.
@36
The government must not “maximize” every tax dollar, it must spend every tax dollar in the most efficient way possible. Those are NOT the same things”
I could not disagree more – those are exactly the same thing. Maximizing battery life means using it in most efficient way possible just as maximizing dollars means using them in the most efficient possible manner – if you disagree with that then we are in a ridiculous semantic argument that is waste of everybody’s time.
@35, 36 – I never said every, all or 100% of corruption must be destroyed. I don’t speak in absolutes because they are exceedingly rare. Therefore one must generalize to some degree. If we are to look at just the audit they spent +/- 10 million to find 280 in waste and that was just this one audit that was looking for inefficiencies. I don’t know what they would find with a 50 million dollar budget and the resources to investigate a wider swath of possible abuses, but i’d like to know. Even if they didn’t find another single red cent the program would still be in the black by hundreds of millions of dollars.
@37 despite the fact that i do generalize i have made a point to say over and over again that there are a lot of people out there that need and deserve social programs. If you read through my posts you will see that i am very much in favor of treating the people that need help who are currently slipping through society’s cracks. I do not want paranoid schizophrenics failing to receive the proper medication and supervision that they so desperately need.
– I guess i just don’t understand the motive to ignore wasteful spending and abuse when not ignoring it will save us hundreds of millions of dollars. While that might not be enough to cover our multi-billion dollar shortfall it’s something. Their ARE going to be billions of dollars in cuts with or without investigating waste and abuse. At least investigating waste and abuse offers some return on investment.
@41 no i am in favor of spending money to have the proper oversight to make sure that those hundreds of thousands of dollars were not wasted in the first place. I’ll gladly spend 1000 on a financial adviser to increase my profits by 5000. It seems that does not appear to be the consensus. People seemed to be so concerned about 500,000 mortgage that is under-water that they forget that any improvement is improvement even if it seems like a drop in the bucket.
@42 in your analogy you have a bunch of leaky faucets that you you won’t pay to have fixed correctly so they leak and cause water damage to the structure and the foundation and after time you saved 1000 by not calling the plumber but you ruined your 250,000 dollar house in the process…good work
@40 because raising taxes is so easy right? See every election ever…how did those campaign promises of lots of new taxes work out? How about those initiatives that raise taxes…many of those get passed? How bout that lest recessive income tax initiative 1098 that would have eased some of the pain everybody knew was coming? How did that do?
Pies in the skies don’t make dinner
flounder: okay, you’ve managed to divert us all (yet again) from goldy’s essential point.
And that is: no matter how much waste and fraud there is, it is a trivial proportion of the overall budget gap. Even if we fix every single leaky faucet in the joint, it does not close the gap.
So, how do propose we fill the 90% gap (I’ll give you 10%, you don’t deserve it, but I’ll give it to you) between solving fraud and waste and the gap? That is the question we need to force people to answer.
The budget is a public document. Go through it. Identify what you think is useless and come back with concrete details. Until you identify specific line items you’re just like Timmy.
Put up or shut up.
Flounder, have you bought anything recently? Anything really big, like a car? Well, do so and you’ll be helping everyone. Because the reason the state is out of money is not through waste, it’s because this state is financed by sales tax, and nobody’s been buying stuff.
Quit arguing nonsense and go to your nearest Lexus dealer, please.
@47 thanks for the (very generous) 10%. If the next 10 commenters bring their 10% we’ll be there. I’m just suggesting that we not leave money on the table on our way out the door to get a loan we can’t afford.
I usually enjoy flounder, particularly with shiso leaf, but this flounder is thick and dense, lacking all subtlety and nuance.