Page 59 - AAGLA-JUNE 2022

Feature Story
The 2021 Follow the Money Report
Billions in California Taxpayer Dollars Needlessly Wasted Documented in Howard
Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation Report
This Article Was Contributed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association
Introduction Meanwhile, tourism, long a California strength, continued
its annual edition of the Follow the Money Report detailing is now years behind schedule and hundreds of millions over examples of government waste, fraud, and abuse in the past budget. This disaster, which some have suggested could have
year that total in the billions.
The examples in this new report should be grounds for them to ask hard questions to the political class which continues to fail to prevent such abuses from occurring. Among the examples cited in the report are a $1.7 billion contract awarded to a COVID testing lab whose employees had been reported sleeping on the job and billions of new delays and cost overruns in the state’s high speed rail program.
“When California taxpayers must struggle to make ends meet more than ever with inflation and gas prices at record highs, there is truly no excuse for politicians to spend their hard- earned money so recklessly,” said Jon Coupal, Chairman of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation. “Taxpayers now need accountability more than ever,” he said.
This last year, the State of California once again ranked the worst in the nation to do business, according to an annual report by “CEO Magazine,” and numerous examples of waste, fraud and abuse totaling billions of taxpayer dollars “down the drain” and were reported by independent investigations. However, none of that is new. For years, Sacramento has tied up small business owners in red tape and wasted the people’s hard-earned tax dollars without much in the way of political repercussions.
Perhaps it is exactly this lack of consequence for their mismanagement that has made the political class believe they can continue to abuse the public trust forever without jeopardizing their position of power. However, this last year brought signs that people may no longer be willing to look the other way just because the weather is pleasant. For the first time ever, Silicon Valley, long one of California’s biggest economic engines, saw its share of venture capital investment nationally fall below 20%.
been averted completely by using an off-the-shelf solution, has been discussed in the Follow the Money report before because the delays have turned into an ongoing saga that may even threaten California’s credit rating. The latest target completion date is now the summer of 2022, but this date has been pushed back five times already from its original target of 2016, so whether this time is the true completion date is anybody’s guess.
An investigation by auditors at the nonprofit OpenTheBooks. com found Los Angeles lifeguards can make a virtual fortune. They found in 2019, 82 lifeguards made over $200,000 and seven made over $300,000, including the value of benefits.
It’s Your Money, But You Can’t See the Checkbook ...
Can you imagine if you or I told the IRS we “can’t locate” our records? The Federal government, hundreds of large cities and 49 states are all able to produce a checkbook detailing their spending. However, in California a watchdog organization has been requesting this information for nearly two years and has yet to receive the records, with State Controller Betty Yee saying she “can’t locate” them. In fact, the organization requesting the records says not a single transaction out of $320 billion of spending has been disclosed.
DMV Employees Admitted Taking Bribes for Licenses
Five Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) employees at the agency’s Torrance and Lincoln Park offices admitted taking bribes in exchange for issuing licenses to unqualified drivers. Tens of thousands of dollars were received in connection with the scandal and the employees involved admitted to taking bribes several times a week. The scam was discovered by a DMV investigator who noticed an unusual pattern associated with the fraudulent applications.
to suffer in 2021 despite a $95 million marketing blitz by the Newsom administration. California tourism in 2021, while up from 2020, still lagged far below its 2019 performance, with many travelers opting to go instead to Florida, which made major gains. California’s ongoing exodus of jobs and productive citizens also resulted in the state’s first-ever loss of a Congressional seat, indicating the state’s political power in Washington may be on the decline if the policies driving this exodus remain unaddressed.
he consequences of California’s
failure to provide meaningful
accountability manifest in declines
in venture capital investment,
tourism, and Congressional
representation. Once again,
around this year’s “Tax Day”
(e.g., the IRS tax filing deadline),
the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers
Foundation has once again issued California’s new budget system, a program dubbed “Fi$Cal,”
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