Auditing Government spending - all records public-online - pay rewards for finding fraud or waste

I recently found that the position of auditor is often an elected position in many municipalities and in other cases is an appointed position - which makes little sense b/c the administration that is in charge of assigning an auditor is also the admin that is being audited (though past admin's can/are also audited).


I think this is the perfect place to open the books to the public and allow individuals and businesses to pick over the books. They could publish their findings online for all to see and they should get a % for the fraud, mis-spending, waste, etc that is found to be against regulations.

I would think this type of process could greatly help in the US, UK, EU, Aus, NZ, and every other 1st world country that has a relatively high per capita income. This is b/c I suspect there would be an army of people from countries with very low wages pouring over the numbers, much like we see when jop postings are placed online for remote tech services, web site design, comp admin, etc - I once had about 1,000 people respond to a single job ad for a custom website design and 95%+ were from India, Philippines, Indonesia, China, etc. Basically we can exploit the wage differences between the countries and both parties would greatly benefit b/c the governments could get rid of waste/overages/fraud and the people in the "lower wage" countries could make comparatively huge returns per hour worked.

I'm not sure how auditing works exactly but I've heard many disturbing cases from the US, UK, Aus and EU where people report massive healthcare related fraud and it is ignored by the agencies to whom it was reported. IDK how to make these politicians accountable, but I think audits need to be made completely public, from start to finish, with all results posted online - so if fraud is reported, we can see the action/non-action by the administration and hold the appropriate parties accountable.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Illinois needs this asap!

originally posted by: JAGStorm
a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Illinois needs this asap!

I agree, so does Philly & Pittsburgh!

The only thing I'm not sure about is how they can find accurate prices for various items that the government pays for. I've seen things like IV bags costing $600-900 for a saline bag (retail $5-9) and tylenol costing over $100 for a dose. I would think there would need to be an "agreed price list" for all items that the government buy's or uses, and the allowable prices could be placed on this list.

One of the biggest issues is many government agencies buy through "approved vendors" which often keep their price lists confidential b/c if the public new what they charged, they'd be swinging from a lamppost. This is why we see things like printer cartridges costing $400+ where a replacement on amazon might cost $10-40, but the approved vendor already has been cleared to do business with the government and the gov workers can put in a PO and not have to set up a payment account.

This method might have been alright decades ago, but it seems most likely that the profit margins made by these approved vendors has increased every year (we aren't talking about inflation rates, that would be OK) but with the way commerce can take place today, we need to take a look at the need for "approved vendors" because I think it actually discriminates against a HUGE number of businesses.

They can no longer say that it saves $ to have a couple vendors. The time has passed where we have to mail in a credit card form and get carbon copies of CC transactions. We have electronic CC processing that can do millions of transactions a minute! There is no reason we need to only run one transaction a day, in order to save money with a single vendor.

This is OUR government.

“We the People” should be able to keep them in line and accountable.

Good idea.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof

Fortunately in my state we are in the right direction.

www.watchdog.org...

Also my taxes are down, but my house price is up!

originally posted by: Metallicus
This is OUR government.

“We the People” should be able to keep them in line and accountable.

Good idea.

I agree. Are you saying this b/c you don't like the idea of out-sourcing? I should have expanded on that point as I originally wrote this solely with US citizens doing the auditing but then I thought about how so many things are out-sourced and wondered what the eventual progression of this would be (how the companies would eventually do this), and then ran with what is above. I was trying to keep it shorter for the OP so I didn't re-visit it.

When I think about this issue, I think this would be an ideal project for accounting students where they can gain experience and earn income if they do their job correctly. It could be incorporated into actual classes or as some kind of "auxiliary" study or "independent internship" type work. This is just an idea of utilizing people who would be "hungry" for the work as I think the younger generations would benefit the most from catching gov waste/fraud early, which would only help them down the road while also putting some cash in their pockets.

a reply to: DigginFoTroof


From the UK where the NHS is always needing money. I have always said that

teams of auditors should do random audits in hospitals and look for wastage of

money. .....Today I was incensed to read in the papers.

The £5.5m NHS fraudsters: Billing for work on dead patients. Stealing vital equipment. Even robbing a charity fund. As it’s revealed £1.25bn is stolen from health service a year meet the doctors, nurses and contractors who abused your trust

Astonishing £1.25 billion is believed to be stolen from the NHS every single year
Around a quarter of the stolen money is taken by patients in prescription fraud
Desperate staff members also steal money they need from the health service

# £1.4M: DENTIST DECEIVED FOR DESIGNER SHOES
# £1.3M: SUPERVISOR’S THEFT STOPPED VITAL SURGERIES
# £700,000: MANAGER WHO HID A SCAM BEHIND HIS DOG
# £655,000: DIRECTOR IN CONSPIRACY OVER FALSE INVOICES
# £600,000: NHS LOCKSMITH WHO SIPHONED FUNDS
# £430,000: HEART EXPERT HEADED A TEAM OF TRICKSTERS
# £330,000: PROPERTY MAD PAIR’S MILLION POUND FRAUD
# £55,000: SECRETARY WHO STOLE FROM CHARITY FUND
# £44,000: GUARD WHO PILFERED HOSPITAL CAR PARK MACHINES
# £24,000: RADIOLOGIST RUMBLED FOR FAKE OVERTIME CLAIMS
# £20,000: CEO PAID HER HUSBAND FOR BOGUS DESIGN WORK

www.dailymail.co.uk...


I know your thread is about the US..... But this sort of thing is happening

every where and its peoples money that they were taxed for that is being

pilfered and stolen.

originally posted by: eletheia
a reply to: DigginFoTroof


From the UK where the NHS is always needing money. I have always that teams

of auditors should do random audits in hospitals and look for wastage of money.

Today I was incensed to read in the papers.

The £5.5m NHS fraudsters: Billing for work on dead patients. Stealing vital equipment. Even robbing a charity fund. As it’s revealed £1.25bn is stolen from health service a year meet the doctors, nurses and contractors who abused your trust

Astonishing £1.25 billion is believed to be stolen from the NHS every single year
Around a quarter of the stolen money is taken by patients in prescription fraud
Desperate staff members also steal money they need from the health service

# £1.4M: DENTIST DECEIVED FOR DESIGNER SHOES
# £1.3M: SUPERVISOR’S THEFT STOPPED VITAL SURGERIES
# £700,000: MANAGER WHO HID A SCAM BEHIND HIS DOG
# £655,000: DIRECTOR IN CONSPIRACY OVER FALSE INVOICES
# £600,000: NHS LOCKSMITH WHO SIPHONED FUNDS
# £430,000: HEART EXPERT HEADED A TEAM OF TRICKSTERS
# £330,000: PROPERTY MAD PAIR’S MILLION POUND FRAUD
# £55,000: SECRETARY WHO STOLE FROM CHARITY FUND
# £44,000: GUARD WHO PILFERED HOSPITAL CAR PARK MACHINES
# £24,000: RADIOLOGIST RUMBLED FOR FAKE OVERTIME CLAIMS
# £20,000: CEO PAID HER HUSBAND FOR BOGUS DESIGN WORK

www.dailymail.co.uk...


I know your thread is about the US..... But this sort of thing is happening

every where and its peoples money that they were taxed for that is being

pilfered and stolen.

Lol, it was actually the story you quoted that made me think of this. It is odd that in the US we often get more information about the mis-spending in the UK than we do about US mis-spending - it's usually aired on a PBS/BBC affiliate.

This is one of the reasons I'm 100% against any kind of socialized programs in the US, b/c of the way our govenment works. There is too much room for vendors to over-charge w/o proper over-sight.

Now if we implement some kind of reward based system where people who commit fraud go to jail (and or STEEP fine) and the auditors get a % of the fraud/waste that they find. I would think that there would be a lot of people (this would be great for retired public servants possibly?) willing to look for the mis-spent funds.

The only thing that I see as a potential problem is when many people review the same data at once, say a school's budget and 10 independent auditors looking at it. It seems like a waste of time for all to look at it, especially if other budgets are missed b/c of this. If there was some kind of queue where people cold sign up to review the data, that would be beneficial, but then you might also get people paid to over-look certain aspects of budgets (they are paid to sign up for a specific budget in order to let things slide).. The only way that I can see getting around this would be to issue audits randomly and have more than one person audit the same budget - then at the end, they get a score - if they miss a lot of stuff while another person finds much more - then they are scored appropriately and thus get awarded later budgets based on their prior work.

This isn't an easy nut to crack and it seems like one that has been overlooked for a long time for some reason, unless a political party can greatly benefit from uncovering some kind of mis-spending - which is really sad. Putting this back into the people's hands is the only way to get the government and spending back under control.

This topic is one hot political potato. The Pentagon blow up it's own department looking into a few missing Trillion dollars on 9/11. Best to start small if trying to bring transparency to government, local and state stuff before trying to take on the big boy at the federal and international level.

China has been working on an AI accounting system 'Zero Trust'. Seams that it has been working well amongst its smaller target audience that the bigger boys in that nation are trying to fight it. Link

I agree with the idea of transparency but the reward should only be available to citizens. Our government is accountable to it's constituents, not the people of India or any other country.

Their well-being is not the concern of our government. The purpose of government is to serve it's citizenry, not foreign peoples.