Last year, authorities arrested a woman named Harriette Walters for allegedly stealing somewhere in the area of $50 million over a period of 20 years from the taxpayers of Washington, DC. Walters is accused of using her position in the tax office of the DC government to issue a number of fake property tax refund checks to various friends and family. Walters is still in jail awaiting trial and at least six people aside from Walters are likely to end up in prison before the year is out.
Meanwhile, the DC government has just revealed that its Summer Youth Employment Program blew through 50 million dollars in just three months. The program has been an unmitigated disaster. Because of rank incompetence and a lot of buck-passing, hundreds of people were drawing checks who should not have been including: 1) people enrolled in the program last year but not this year, 2) people working in the program who were getting checks for more hours than they worked, 3) a “few” people over 50 years old, 4) a couple hundred people who didn’t even live in the District, and 5) people who did no work at all, but drew checks anyhow.
All of these checks were approved by the DC government. the Mayor’s office said that in just this past week, it has purged 5,000 names from the program, which had enrolled 21,000; almost 25 percent of the people int he program had no business being there.
Thus far, the only punishment that had been meted out is the resignation of the program’s director who, I do not doubt, will find a similar job in another city or with another organization. There will be no criminal investigation, even though this money is gone as surely as the money that Harriette Walters allegedly stole. No one in the Mayor’s Office will find themselves having to testify in front of the residents of DC about wher their money has gone. There will be no lasting consequences.
That is why big, overreaching government is harmful. There is no ultimate accountability. No one is really punished for stunning incompetence. Your money isn’t treated as something precious or important. It’s just something to throw around to whoever for whatever, whenever. And you can’t stop them from spending it once they decide to take it from you. The best you can do is to find your way into something like the Summer Youth Employment Program and hope you can swipe some of it back.
Tags: Big Government, Corruption, Washington DC
