Just when you thought President Bush was so lame a duck he couldn't do anything else to lower his approval rating, a new report was issued by Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY), which states that the Bush Administration failed to implement over 13,000 recommendations made by Inspectors General - the investigators buried within each agency - since 2001. According to the report, those recommendations, if implemented, could have saved taxpayers nearly $26 billion.
“If someone told me that I was losing change from a hole in my pocket and instead of mending it I kept losing money, shame on me. But that’s what has happened over the past seven years to the tune of $25 billion, as thousands of inspectors general recommendations were ignored by our government,” said Sen. McCaskill. “It’s time to finally get out some needle and thread.”
The report was spawned when the House Oversight Committee asked the nation’s IGs to identify all recommendations made between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2008, that had not been implemented by federal agencies. Almost half of these recommendations were made over a year ago, and more than a quarter were made over two years ago.
“The Inspectors General have done the hard work of identifying waste and fraud, but agencies have not been fixing the problems,” said Rep. Towns.
Inspectors General are responsible for conducting independent audits and investigations of agency programs and staff, making recommendations to protect the interests of taxpayers and improve the effectiveness of government. Their work is akin to the work of Internal Affairs at police departments, in that they help root out corruption, waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse. Under the Inspector General Act, each agency is required to decide whether it agrees with the IG’s findings and recommendations within six months of the release of a final report. If the agency fails to to do so within one year, the IG must disclose the delay in semi-annual reports to Congress.
When IGs issue reports, we'd all hope their advice is followed. But like the Government Accountability Office's daily recommendations, many of them are simply ignored. When they are, the taxpayer is left holding the bill for the staff time that went into the report, the failed programs highlighted in the reports, and the paper the reports were printed on.
Examples of unimplemented IG recommendations with potential monetary benefits highlighted in the report include:
- In April 2006, the Social Security Administration IG estimated that the agency could save more than $2 billion annually by ceasing payments to people who no longer meet the eligibility criteria for disability benefits due to medical improvement or employment status.
- In July 2007, the Defense Department IG estimated that the Pentagon could recoup $837 million in overpayments by establishing effective recovery audits for military telecommunications contracts.
- In February 2007, the Department of Homeland Security IG concluded that FEMA could recover $16 million in excessive billings and questionable costs resulting from poor management of a contract for base camp services associated with Hurricane Katrina.
The five agencies that could save the most money by implementing open
recommendations are the Social Security Administration, the Department
of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, the Department
of Transportation, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, could save approximately $16.3 billion by implementing open IG recommendations.
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