I wrote a few weeks ago about Harriet Walters and Dianne Gustus of the Washington DC ‘ Office of Tax and Revenue who scammed US taxpayers out of betweeen $20 and $30 million by issuing bogus property tax refunds. You might ask yourself how a relatively low-level employee might get away carrying loads of cash out of the public coffers. Easy – everyone in the Washington DC government are corrupt.
“How dare you say such a thing, paint with such a broad brush over every single District government employee” you might be asking. Well, judge for yourself. I found this in a Washington Examiner article from earlier in the week;
The 51-year-old Walters was known as “Mother Harriette†in her office — the woman to see for emergency loans, designer clothes and accessories, even floor-level Wizards tickets, three sources with direct knowledge of the widening federal and local investigations said.
She also paid out large cash rewards, in increments of up to $20,000 at a time, to fellow workers who helped her edit and complete her paperwork, sources said. Her annual salary was $81,000.
According the source, a few months before her Nov. 7 arrest, Walters was called into a meeting with Terez Badger, a chief in the tax office, and Susan Lee, a deputy chief and Walter’s direct supervisor. They told her to stop giving out the presents and taking her co-workers on shopping sprees.
Everyone in her office knew she was stealing – how else could she afford to hand out what amounted to 1/4 of her annual salary for doing her work around the office? And everyone knew her reputation for handing out goodies – everyone was in on it. But as long as they got their cut, they didn’t care. No one blew the whistle on her, no one asked any hard questions - her supervisors just told her to stop buying gifts for everyone. Not wondering for a minute where she got her money.
See, Mother Walters was cutting property tax refund checks that never made it to the people for whom they were intended (whether they deserved refunds or not isn’t clear yet).
Wonder what the District’s Chief Financial Officer’s office has to say about it? Washington Times’ Jim McElhatton;
“It’s the belief of the CFO’s office that we should have done a closer investigation of the data,” Natalie Wilson, spokeswoman for the CFO’s office, said this week. “If we had gotten down in the weeds and closely examined the data, maybe we could have identified it.”
“If we’d gotten down in the weeds…” Um, where I come from, 20 million bucks isn’t in the weeds. When property tax refunds skyrocket 110%, in just one year, how thick is that weedlot?
From fiscal 2003 to 2004, for example, a review of the CFO’s monthly cash reports show real property-tax collections rose 11.8 percent. But refunds soared nearly 10 times that rate — by 110.8 percent.
“That should have been a big red flag,” said financial specialist Larry Crumbley, a Louisiana State University professor and author of a book on forensic accounting.
Ya think? Well, not in DC where corruption is just part of day-to-day life. “Well, at least DC officials caught up with Mother Walters”, you’re saying to yourself, “At least someone was on the job”. Think?
D.C. officials only learned about the purported theft after federal authorities, acting on a tip from a local bank, began an investigation.
$20 million in taxpayer money missing and it takes a tip from the bank to figure out the money is missing. No one’s accountable and criminals all have legitimate excuses for what they’ve done. I’m pretty sure Mother Walters will skate, relatively speaking, the criminal investigation will probably drain off another $20 million from the taxpayers coffers and she’ll get a slap on the wrist. Ask Marion Berry about his tax evasion trial and conviction.
