ribit,
I was talking with a client who deals with state and city agencies in his business and he told me about one of these agencies that was going through a routine federal audit. This agency had received a $100 million grant of federal funds appropriated for disaster relief. At the start of the audit, the feds asked the agency personnel if they could account for all of the $100 million that was spent. The response was that they could only account for $60 million of it. THEY DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE HOW THE OTHER $40 MILLION WAS SPENT!!!
The federal auditors just shrugged their shoulders and said, "Oh well, we suppose we will figure that out when we do our audit."
Somehow, I have my doubts whether all of these unaccounted for expenditures ever get properly traced. Auditors use a "materiality concept" in deciding how hard to pursue unaccounted for items. When they are accounting for other people's money that is commonly treated as nothing much more than "Monopoly Money," I strongly suspect their materiality threshold is rather high in the extreme.
And then ... irrespective of the obvious governmental incompetency and fraud where money is concerned ... politicians, especially libtard ones with a "D" behind their names, bitch and bellyache about citizens not wanting to pay taxes. Idiots!
B.