Saturday, July 6, 2013

Government and Private Charity Fraud, Waste and Abuse

Read this item which describes the problems Big Brothers and Big Sisters charitible organization has with managing its charitable funds.  Substantial fraud, waste and abuse abound.  Gives one pause as to what charities we should support.  Note that there is a push on to have the government provide more intensive oversight to assure such problems are mitigated.  http://www.washingtonguardian.com/big-brothers-big-sisters-big-waste

Now consider this government run program which exists on the backs of honest, hard working taxpayers.  The Center for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) made Medicare over payments of at least $543 million between 2007 and 2010 which has not and cannot be recovered because it cannot determine to whom those over payments were made.  The CMS estimates that it has an over payment recovery rate of 80% and claims that rate is highly effective. Get that?  They think that blowing only 20% of their taxpayer funding is a good deal.   http://www.washingtonguardian.com/call-collector

So, in the first case a private charity cannot document how its money is spent while in the second case neither can the government.  Yet the proposed solution to problems with the first is to subject it to more control by the second.  An oxymoron if I ever saw one.  Unfortunately these two examples pale in comparison to the total amounts of charitable gifts and confiscated taxes that are unaccounted for every year.  But, the scale of government fraud, waste and abuse of forcefully collected tax payer monies far exceeds that of freely given donations to private charities.  Before the government claims it is best positioned to oversee the accounting practices of private charities it needs to get its own house in order, something unlikely to happen in our lifetime, if ever.

George Burns

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