Our hard-drinkin’ State Auditor, Tom Salmon, CPA, CFE, ABS*, SOB**, DMW***, has put out another breathless news release announcing an expedition into the rat-infested gutters of government spending. This time, he compared — er, his staff compared — the Department of Human Services’ list of people eligible for assistance with the Social Security Administration’s list of deceased recipients.
*Alphabet Soup
** Self-explanatory
*** Dead Man Walking
Well, that sounds juicy. Probably found a boatload of literal deadbeats (sorry) collecting taxpayer funds from beyond the grave.
As you read his news release, you don’t immediately find out how much zombie teatsucking he uncovered. First, he goes through a lengthy explanation of state and federal record-keeping processes, and how his office conducted its audit.
Finally, in paragraph four, you get the money shot.
$10,600.
That’s ten thousand, six hundred dollars, spent on a total of 31 individuals listed as dead by Social Security. (“Spent on,” not necessarily “given to” — in a least two cases, money was sent to a health-care provider on behalf of a deceased patient for case-management fees.)
But wait, there’s more! According to Salmon’s own report, much of the money has already been recovered. He doesn’t say exactly how much, because it would further reduce the size of his already pathetic discovery.
To quote Salmon’s report, “Vermont spends well over a billion dollars annually on human services programs.” It’s unclear exactly how much time his audit covers, but it refers to one case of a person who died in 2008. So it’s safe to conclude that multiple years of disbursements are included.
In which case, all I can say is: Damn fine job, Agency of Human Services! You handled billions of dollars in payments, and you only gave $10,600 to dead people. AND you got some of that money back!
That’s brilliant! It’s a record that any government agency — or private-sector business, for that matter — would be proud of.
And it explains why (1) Salmon buried the dollar figure deep in his news release, (2) he didn’t hold a news conference to trumpet the findings, and (3) the Vermont media haven’t reported his findings. At all.
I don’t know how much money ol’ Tom spent on this audit, but I bet it was a hell of a lot more than $10,600.
Oh, one other thing. The report includes a response from Doug Racine, Secretary of the Agency of Human Services. In it, Racine notes that the Social Security Administration’s death list isn’t always (ahem) the last word:
Overall, we are hesitant to rely on the SSA Deaths Master File (DMF) as an authoritative data source of deceased persons. According to the OIG*, “…there are about 1,000 cases each month in which a living individual is mistakenly included in the DMF…”
So it’s possible that some of those “dead” Vermont beneficiaries may, in fact, be alive.
I just can’t wait until this schmo clears out his office and moves on to one of those high-paying jobs he claims to have been offered. The taxpayers of Vermont will be able to breathe a sigh of relief when Tom Salmon can no longer engage in attention-seeking snipe hunts on the public dime.
is a perfect example of why the Auditor should report the cost of each audit on the website (something I’ve advocated since 2010).
James O’Keefe, the right wing loser who gins up fake controversies over things that never happened with
creativedishonest video editing. Tom probably wished auditing could include manipulated video, so he, too, could be a celebrated nontroversy “hero.”My guess is he has gone on multiple fishing expeditions to try to expose issues with programs that fit into the right wing’s pet peeve list. Alas, as is usually the case, right wing speculation about the worst case in social programs rarely converges with reality. It’s just too bad they keep getting policy passed based on the speculation. My favorite is the Florida drug testing for welfare recipients that demonstrated that welfare recipients use drugs at half the rate of the rest of the population, and which costs far more than it would cost to simply give all those recipients their benefits. When they start believing their own propaganda (poor = lazy, drug addicted, shiftless, with pigmented skin), they end up costing everyone more.
After years of not being terribly interested in the work of being our Auditor of Accounts he is facing the fact that nobody’s going to be interested in what he does once he leaves office.