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?

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:

Your complacency is what allows the corruption to happen in the first place.

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.

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.

@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.

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:

The State Auditor’s Office operates an exceptional program of fraud education, prevention and investigation.

Each year, we investigate:

An average of 36 suspected frauds.
Approximately $713,000 in losses each year.
In the past 22 years, we have investigated:

More than 790 frauds.
More than $15.6 million in losses.
Our Fraud Manager monitors all fraud cases throughout the state. In addition, each of our audit teams has designated a fraud specialist. Each year, we train more than 2,500 government employees on preventing and detecting 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.