Accountability

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Proposal:

Every government expenditure must be supervised. Large expenditures must be supervised with greater vigor.

Intent:

Fraud, waste, and abuse are causes of huge amounts of wasted taxpayer money. Although there may already be laws regarding this, we should always look for opportunities to improve accountability and our ability to prevent, detect, and respond to corruption.

Discussion:

Instead of sending a large amount of money to a county, state, or foreign country, and letting them use it without any supervision, any government that allocates money for spending must also supervise that spending. Put the allocated money into an account and have a team of officers who are accountable to the government who provided the money to write the checks for specific items as needed and ensure their delivery and appropriate use.

Instead of sending large amounts and then only investigating when there are allegations of impropriety, government must be proactive in accounting for the use of funds and keep a record of each individual disbursement, every expense, every grant, and every loan — who the recipient was, what the amount was, what the purpose was, and who authorized it.

In addition to the immediate situational awareness this will develop, it also makes it harder for fraudsters to try and hide their fraud later by tampering with “the books” because there is a set of records they don’t control, held by the government that wrote the checks.

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