Audits, Corruption & New Jersey: Perfect Together

Today the Asbury Park Press reported that an audit of Clean Ocean and Shore Trust Commission (COAST), a government-funded environmental group, found that there is little oversight of the group that hands out taxpayer money in the form of grants. Some contracts signed just happened to go to someone related to the executive director of COAST.

[The audit] found the agency had a limited paper trail — with no records of any meetings or staff timesheets — and had awarded contracts that should have been subject to a sealed bidding process to a vendor with a personal relationship with the executive director.

It appears that COAST is not an efficient group; more than half its budget is used to pay the executive director.

Why do we have such government-funded groups? I am not certain, but I suspect COAST will be de-funded in the budget that is being considered right now for next year. I also hope that Attorney General Rabner will investigate Andrew S. Voros who thinks COAST is too important to be lost.

He [Voros] said the commission would “lose any kind of meaning inside the DEP.”

This $150,000 is small change in a $32 billion state budget, but it is emblematic of the corruption that pervades New Jersey.

Notice, however, how this corruption was found out . . . through an audit. Audits are essential to smoke out those intentional misuses of tax dollars as well as the unintentional misuses. Audits provide efficiency to a system. Government is a huge system that is frequently inefficient. Reviewing how it does business is good for everyone.

Some parts of government, however, do not believe in the audit system. The New Jersey Department of Education completes audits on the 600+ school districts to ensure that the billions of tax dollars spent are done so efficiently. It’s review should ferret out corruption as well as streamline processes. Yet, a deal struck with the Abbott districts this year was done by stating no one would review the audit if the districts just shut up and took the money.

“At the end she said, ‘Now we’ll offer you 3 percent and we won’t look at the audit, you won’t have to answer any questions about your budget, it will be approved,’” Parker recalled. “‘However, if you raise a question, if you ask for more than 3 percent, we’re going to then examine every line in your budget and we’re going to look at the details and all the information we get from the auditors, and we will look at your budget with a fine-tooth comb.

The districts did. That the Abbotts spend the biggest chunk of the DOE budget for a mere 30 of those 600-some districts and it spends without government audits is not good business.

We, the taxpayers, lose out when audits are shunned. Intentional misuses of tax dollars and systematic money pits continue. That contributes to ever-higher state budgets, which in turn increase the money taxpayers cough up.

Mr. Rabner would do well to investigate whether there is any validity to the statements made by Abbott district officials that the NJ DOE said the audits would not be scrutinized if they accepted the deal offered. Governor Corzine promised us a different ethical political climate if elected. It seems like it is nothing but more egregious.

Investigate the DOE to close up the shady politics. Certainly we can all agree that none of this is thorough and efficient.

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