Over the past year or so, evidence appears to indicate there is widespread fraud totaling millions of dollars or more in several states, including Washington.
These are staggering numbers. They make you wonder why it is so low on the list of things to fix?
With the claims of fraud initially denied — with those asking questions often being called racist for even being suspicious — it makes me wonder how it ever got this bad.
And then you read a story titled “No state investigation planned nearly six months after questions raised on Washington's day care subsidies” from The Center Square and it makes sense.
After a state audit flagged about $37 million in questionable payments, they didn’t look for fraud, or call it fraud, or keep looking to see if it was fraud.
And apparently neither is the committee charged with oversight.
The state agency charged to do that is the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), as well as the Department of Commerce.
That rang a bell, and sure enough, DCYF is also the agency responsible for Green Hill, which has a long history of issues repeated without oversight, too.
So, there is $37 million in questionable spending and no interest from the state to look into it for fraud, and our governor has announced another grant of $57 million for daycare subsidies. Maybe this is why our state is in a financial mess.
Plus, the state is now going to hide the business names from view to prevent anyone who wants to know where the tax dollars are going from finding out.
State Sen. Leonard Christian, R-Spokane Valley, in a May 8 press release wondered, “If your bookkeeper found a $37 million discrepancy in your accounts, wouldn’t you want to get to the bottom of it? Wouldn’t you be the least little bit curious?”
Instead, Center Square reported they were chastised by Democrats for even looking for fraud, which seems consistent around the country.
We should be able to expect the high taxes we are forced to pay to at least be legitimately spent.
We should, but we can’t.
In an unrelated but equally disappointing local story, about $300,000 worth of Chromebooks (986 of them) are missing from the Centralia School District.
The Washington state Auditor’s Office (yes the same one that found missing millions in daycare payments) reported "internal control deficiencies" within the Centralia School District.
According to the audit, the district “failed to properly track and safeguard theft-sensitive assets, specifically student Chromebooks.”
State Auditor Pat McCarthy’s team reported “without adequate tracking and monitoring of theft-sensitive assets, the District is at an increased risk that a misappropriation or misuse of public resources could occur.”
“Taxpayers who fund the district’s $60.3 million budget are now seeing the results of what auditors described as a repeat issue; the report noted that similar recommendations to improve asset tracking were made in a prior audit, but were not fully implemented,” auditors wrote.
So, sadly, the district had previously been notified of the poor tracking and didn’t fix it. Will someone be held responsible for this?
Not likely, and we’ll never know because it would be a protected personnel matter.
The district agreed with the findings and has a plan to fix it, which is good, but there is still the loss of a lot of Chromebooks.
The story closed saying the school district has 3,300 students in eight schools, but has 6,714 Chromebooks? That seems curiously high, although I'm not familiar with Chromebooks or what they do with them.
The state auditor said it will check the progress of the schools compliance on its next audit, and that’s for a mere $300,000.
I wonder if they will be rechecking DCYF’s progress on the $37 million in questionable transactions in their audit? Especially since they are getting $57 million more to spread around.
No doubt our governor will be on top of it once he gets past his own ethics issue.
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John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@gmail.com.
