Not for Profit

News story today:

“An Army civilian employee in Texas is accused in a federal indictment of stealing more than $100 million from a fund meant to help military children.

Janet Yamanaka Mello, 57, was indicted Wednesday in a San Antonio district court on 10 total criminal counts including mail fraud, engaging in a monetary transaction using criminal proceeds and aggravated identity theft.”

Cliff notes: Ms. Mello ran a program intended to provide funding to other programs for military children. She created a false company and then paid the invoices. She amassed a huge amount of real estate, expensive cars, etc. The Army never noticed, but the IRS noticed a GS- whatever living well outside her supposed means.

The kicker for me is something I hadn’t thought about much before, but should have. After my military service I worked for a corporation in San Antonio. My company was ruthless about cutting costs and monitoring profit in each division. It would have taken about 5 minutes for a scheme like this to be obvious. And yet, .gov is oblivious.

At the most fundamental level, since government doesn’t make any profit, how could it track losses? When I was a civil engineer in the USAF, I read reports on successful units whose success was measured simply by how many resources they could secure for construction, and then spending it. Even as a freshly minted 2LT is seemed bizarre to me but over the years I haven’t thought about it much; I just came to accept that it is how government operates. In fact, not spending all of the money in one’s budget was considered a terrible thing. They might cut your budget next year!

I will say that our county government funds our firefighting operations and they absolutely do not operate this way. They understand that our needs vary from year to year and if we don’t spend all the money in our budget they thank us. We try very hard to be good stewards of tax money.

I recently experienced a more local version of bad practices. Each Texas taxing entity uses an appraisal district to appraise property values and collect taxes. I am starting a term on the board for mine later this month (I will represent the school district where I sit on the board). When I sat in on the December meeting, the incumbent appraisal board members were discussing a surplus. When they collect more taxes than they projected, the taxing entities get first dibs on the excess. The board president said “it’s only $35,000.00.” Another said “a drop in the bucket”. And they intend to keep it. They will be surprised when I am a voting member this month; even if I lose the vote it will be public and they can’t hide any more. I hate to start a new gig as the turd in the punch bowl but it sounds like someone needs to.