GOVERNMENT WASTE

- NEW YORK -

Date	Individual / State Agency	Who, What, Where?
01/05/05	New York City	Congressional Reps Waste Millions on Letters New York City congressmen and congresswomen wasted over $1.4 million on mailings to constituents: · Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney wasted $176,000 in a blizzard of no-cost letters to voters in her Manhattan district. · Representative Peter King wasted $127,000 · Representative Nita Lowey wasted $120,000 · Representative Tim Bishop wasted $100,000 Over a 12-month period, lawmakers spent over $1.4 million on no-cost mailings.
01/21/05	New York State Liquor Authority	Woman Sues To Force State To Give Her Work To Do Pat Freund, an employee of the New York State Liquor Authority for 25 years, has sued the state because she has no work to do. She spends her days since 2000 doing crossword puzzles and reading the newspaper since she angered superiors when she questioned their attendance at Governor Pataki’s annual prayer breakfast. Instead of firing her, they simply took all of her work away.
02/17/05	State of New York	Spending We Don't Need According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, in which they compared similar data on all 50 states, the bank found that although New York and New Jersey tax their citizens well above the average, they have only average public-spending when weighed against the other states.
04/28/05	Congressional Representatives	Congressional Junket Kings According to PoliticalMoneyLine.com, which tracks the trail of money in politics, the number of trips taken by our elected officials, paid for special-interest lobbies, is staggering. The kingpin is James SensenBrenner (Republican - Wisconsin), who must have a wonderful attendance record in Congress, for he managed to take $168,000 in trips. A close second is Representative Maurice Hinchey of New York (Democrat - Ulster County) with a $161,393 tab, who has traveled to Prague, Rome, Moscow, Shanghai and Morocco. His trips took 140 days since 2000, much more than the 102-day session in the current year. So he doesn’t stand out in New York, Representative Gregory Meeks (Democrat - Queens) must have observed the luxurious lifestyle of his compatriot, for he and his wife managed trips to Malaysia, London, Ghana, Jamaica, Barbados and St. Lucia, no doubt to observe the dire poverty in these countries, which just happen to be topnotch tourist attractions. Ironically, Tom Delay (Senator – Texas), who has come under so much heat, is a piker in comparison, ranking only 28^th on the travel circuit.
05/15/05	New York City Controller’s Office	New York City Controller’s Office Desperately Needs Accounting Training A check written by the New York City’s Controllers Office misplaced two decimal points and issued a check in the amount of $8,641,575.00 instead of the correct amount of $86,415.75 to a lawyer representing autistic children. Fortunately, the recipient, who sent the check back for correction, said, “This is not the first sizable overpayment we have returned to the city.” Anyone who has ever worked in the accounting field knows that a system of checks and balances is always in place to prevent these types of errors, but apparently key players in the Controllers Office needs to attend Accounting 101 classes. Will any heads roll over these enormous errors? Not on your life!
06/23/05	New York City School System	Medicaid Demands Payback A federal audit revealed that New York City schools misspent $870 million monies by funneling tens of thousands of poor special-education students into speech therapy classes run by unqualified practitioners without proper referrals. Not only was the money misspent but the audit found that the school system’s record keeping was so disorganized that the auditors could not determine if the students needed the therapy or if it was performed at all. The audit, which covered the period from 1993 to 2001, revealed that a more likely scenario is that the money was diverted to cover other costs in the school system.
07/18/05	New York State Medicaid	Billions Likely Stolen From Medicaid According to the New York Times, the New York Medicaid system, which spends $44.5 billion per year, has become the poster child for fraud, waste and profiteering. A former senior Medicaid fraud prosecutor, John Meekins, said, “It’s like a honey pot. It truly is. That is what they use it for.” 4.2 million New York state residents, one out of every 5 New Yorkers, receive benefit for the system, to the tune of $10,600 per year. This lavish spending naturally was borne of good intentions, but typically with government, it has gotten completely out of hand. Regarding Medicaid fraud Dennis P. Whalen, the executive deputy commissioner of the State Health Department said, “This continues to be an area where we think we have made substantial progress.” This comment preceded the New York Times investigation of Medicaid fraud. The New York Times discovered the following representative incidences of fraud: · Dr. Dolly Rosen, a Brooklyn dentist, claims to have performed as many as 991 procedures per day in 2003. Dr. Rosen and two associates were indicted for stealing $1 million. · While a reporter was watching, scores of people who seemed to walk quite easily were picked up by ambulettes. These services cost $200 million annually. · Thousands of students were enrolled in speech therapy classes without required evaluation. One Buffalo school administrator sent 4,434 students into speech therapy in one day with talking to them or reviewing their records just so he could bill Medicaid. · Medicaid paid for expensive muscle-building drugs, which were then diverted to body builders. One doctor prescribed $11.5 million of the drug. After being informed of the Time’s findings, the Republican majority in the State Senate started to make efforts to overhaul the system, while Democratic majority in the Assembly remained strangely silent on the issue. James Mehmet, the retired chief state investigator of Medicaid fraud believed that 10 percent of state Medicaid dollars were spent on fraudulent claims, with 20 to 30 percent more spent on abuse, meaning unnecessary spending that may not be fraudulent. “So we’re talking about 40 percent of all claims are questionable,” a startling amount of $18 billion per year. The state has never made a concerted effort to determine what amount of Medicaid monies is lost to criminal activity and abuse. But federal auditors have made New York their leading target for the 50 percent the federal government picks up for Medicaid in New York.
10/01/05	New York City Department of Vital Records	Dealing With Incompetent Government Bureaucracies The Apathetic Voter has been assigned by his family to be the executor or fiduciary for my cousin’s estate. As one example of the ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil – me against the government – it was necessary that I apply for a death certificate for my cousin’s mother (my aunt) to prove that she was not an heir to the savings bonds he left to his heirs in his will. Now I was assured by friends I spoke to in the Midwest and the West all you need do is go up to the window in city hall, pay the fee and they photocopy the death certificate for you. This is business as usual generally anywhere else in the country but not with the incompetent bureaucracies that plague the east coast. The only way I could obtain a copy of the death certificate was to request the document in writing from the New York City Department of Vital Records accompanied by a $15.00 fee, a sample of my aunt’s DNA and an in-depth explanation of the mummification rites of Ancient Egypt. Not only that but I had to give the Vital Records people multiple reasons why I needed the death certificate, all under the ruse I’m sure of preventing terrorists from getting a death certificate, as if there would be any plausible reason in the world why they would want one. So on July 22, 2005, I dutifully sent my request via the U. S. Mail carefully dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s so I could assure myself of nonbelligerent service. A funeral director forewarned me that it normally takes the drugged mutants who work in Vital Records 2 to 3 weeks to process your request, but since it was summertime it would likely take 6 weeks. I brushed off his verbal bombast of Vital Records disbelieving that even a government agency could be that inept. Finally, on September 30, 2005, I received a note from the catatonic bureaucrats stating they were unable to find the death certificate – an elapsed period of 70 days from my initial mailing. Did the bureaucrats care that in the meantime I’ve been subsisting on a diet of Alpo and Kibble n’ Bits salivating like Pavlov’s dog for my share of the inheritance? What course of action could I follow? Would it do any good to storm into Vital Records in Manhattan (ironically located on Worth Street) and demand immediate resolution of the problem? How could it take these people 70 days to process a simple request? Let’s see, perhaps its more difficult then I thought? Let’s go through the steps: 1) open the mail; 2) remove the check and place it in today’s deposit basket; 3) read the request; 4) go to the file and pull the death certificate by name or date of death or place of death; 5) make a photocopy; and finally 6) mail the copy to the requestor in the mandatory self-addressed stamped envelope. That must be a backbreaking amount of work – I guess it does take 70 days or is it 70 seconds? I decided to not venture into Manhattan to confront the bureaucracy in the Black Hole of Calcutta, as I was afraid that after a 5-minute confrontational conversation I might turn “postal” in my unfettered rage and wind up in the slammer with Bubba for the rest of my life. What can we citizens possibly do to change the modus operandi of these civil servants? They can’t fire anyone because of the arcane and overly protective civil service regulations. I can just hear one of the bureaucrats crying about how they need more money and people to do the job correctly. By my complaints they may actually raise my taxes to pay for more people to sleep on the job. So I gave up on that idea. I am now seeking alternate methods to obtain the desired death certificate (including trying to raise my aunt from the dead) as I’ve had it up to my nostrils with government incompetence over my lifetime. I should point out that during this nerve-wracking process, the Federal Reserve Bank in Pittsburgh, a non-governmental agency without the intransigence of firing someone for incompetence as with the civil service, was of great assistance in my attempt to negotiate the savings bonds without the requisite death certificate. For those fools who are constantly clamoring for greater government services, beware! You may get what you wish for! I strongly suspect that if the City of New York decided to “privatize” the service, we would all be able to get a copy of a certificate as a “walk in” in 30 minutes for $5.00.
04/01/06	Senate	Whatever You Do, Never Consider Paying Down the Debt Due to the improving economy, New York may experience a $2 to $4.5 billion surplus in their $112 billion state budget. But before the Senate passes the final budget, Senate Republicans are considering tax cuts for the wealthy and the elderly. More importantly, they are considering dropping the tax on private planes. I guess the senators must own a lot of small planes. Knowledgeable voters recognize that tax cuts stimulate the economy, but would it be too much to ask the charlatans who represent themselves as senators to simultaneously make tax cuts and also reduce the state’s long-term debt? According to the New York Times, the Democrats naturally don’t want to spend a dime of the surplus to reduce debt, either. They have a better plan – provide tax cuts for the bottom sphere of the economy (who pay a miniscule percent of those taxes) and more money for schools, as ordered repeatedly by the state's courts. But not even the Assembly has been able to undo the ruinous political formula that decrees that funds for “needy” urban schools must be matched by more spending on wealthy suburban schools. According to the New York State Comptroller, As of March 31, 2005 New York State had approximately $48.2 billion of total debt. This includes $3.7 billion in General Obligation bonds and notes outstanding and an additional $44.6 billion issued and outstanding by State public authorities. In addition to this state-supported debt, public authorities had $81.5 billion in other debt outstanding as of December 31, 2004.  Perhaps one time in the lifetime of the voters, the Republicrats can come together and apply the money to only one purpose – reducing the state’s crushing debt. We would all be overjoyed for our children’s future.