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babylonsister

(170,962 posts)
Mon Apr 20, 2020, 06:26 PM Apr 2020

Sorry, Trump. You can't fire the GAO, and it's investigating what you do with COVID-19 money

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/20/1938843/-Sorry-Trump-You-can-t-fire-the-GAO-and-they-re-investigating-what-you-do-with-COVID-19-money

Sorry, Trump. You can't fire the GAO, and it's investigating what you do with COVID-19 money
Joan McCarter
Daily Kos Staff
Monday April 20, 2020 · 11:17 AM EDT


Impeached president Donald Trump has rampaged through the ranks of inspectors general attempting to provide some kind of check on his corruption. Thankfully for the nation, there's one watchdog agency outside of his reach, and it’s already on the job of auditing what his administration is doing with the $2 trillion Congress handed it in the coronavirus emergency CARES Act.

The General Accountability Office (GAO) is an arm of Congress, and thus Trump can't touch it. "We're moving forward very quickly," Angela Nicole Clowers, chief of the GAO’s healthcare unit, told Politico. "We're an existing institution and have a lot of institutional knowledge about all these programs. It gives us sort of a leg up." All these programs being those that have been given big chunks of money to spend. By the end of this month, senior investigators say, it will have opened at least 30 CARES Act investigations.

Audits and reviews will include the Trump administration's "handling of coronavirus testing" and "distribution of medical equipment." So that should prove interesting. It will also review the administration's response to food supply problems, nursing home infections, and how the various emergency loans and cash distribution has been handled. Here's the good part: "The office is required under the new law to brief Congress every month and issue a bimonthly public report on its findings."


That's not to say that Trump will try to obstruct the GAO, but it does come into this with an additional $20 million from the CARES Act to conduct its oversight of the administration. "Within GAO, we have everyone from policy analysts or public policy people like myself," Clowers said, "we have nurses, we have scientists, we have engineers, we have lawyers. You sort of name an occupation, we have 'em."

It’s already begun, insuring into a tip that a coronavirus cash payment went to an account of someone who died in 2019. "Thankfully, that family was nice enough to return the fund," Howard Arp, the office's fraud unit chief said. "That then causes us to start asking questions. How could that happen? What control was missed? That is already starting." That could happen because the IRS is sending checks to accounts of people who filed taxes in 2018 or 2019—it's not going to automatically know who's dead if the account hasn't been closed out. More of those checks to dead people are going to happen, and it would likely take some kind of intervention from the Treasury department to force banks to act.

The main obstacle they see, Arp and Clowers said, is that the GAO won't be able to be onsite to investigate. Normally, "we go observe, we touch, we feel, we see," Clowers told Politico. "Right now, we're not able to do that, […] but we're leveraging technology to the extent we can."
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Sorry, Trump. You can't fire the GAO, and it's investigating what you do with COVID-19 money (Original Post) babylonsister Apr 2020 OP
Dat not good for Lord F*ckitup. TxVietVet Apr 2020 #1
They "investigated" TARP. Igel Apr 2020 #3
Tone from the top Python boot Apr 2020 #5
He can't fire them, but he'll certainly ignore all their requests for information. tinrobot Apr 2020 #2
But will anyone care? Russian election interference, no biggie. Bribing Ukraine, so what. Billions Pepsidog Apr 2020 #4
To Daily Kos - GAO stands for Government Accountability Office Lord Ludd Apr 2020 #6

TxVietVet

(1,905 posts)
1. Dat not good for Lord F*ckitup.
Mon Apr 20, 2020, 06:29 PM
Apr 2020

Please say they are actually do an audit and show the results to the public.

Igel

(35,191 posts)
3. They "investigated" TARP.
Mon Apr 20, 2020, 07:18 PM
Apr 2020

They "investigated" the Obama stimulus money.

It's their job.

What use is made of their findings depends on spin. Take the first bit of corruption. IRS bad for sending it to dead people. Then again, IRS was told to send it to those who filed, and some of those will be dead, with no way for the IRS to know who's died.

There'll be lots of those. GAO wants controls on everything to reduce errors to 0. That's its job, the "wanting". What controls are put in place are constrained by the need to actually do things. If you only act when there's no chance of error, it means you don't act. The old "Do you want it done fast or do you want it done right" when pushed becomes "Do you want it done or do you want things perfect?" For small projects with few moving pieces, you can get pretty close to perfect.

So the GAO will complain, even as they know that their complaints are often perfunctory. Then the question is whether the complaints are understood in context or stripped of context and made into monumental political scandals.

Because even in 2010 and 2011 when that kind of penny ante stuff was found in the stimulus funding it wasn't a big deal. It was apparently lived a saner time.

Python boot

(74 posts)
5. Tone from the top
Mon Apr 20, 2020, 08:50 PM
Apr 2020

Auditors will tell you that you can have the best control procedures on paper but the will not be implemented if the "tone from the top" supports controls. Obviously thetonefrom the top stinks.

Pepsidog

(6,252 posts)
4. But will anyone care? Russian election interference, no biggie. Bribing Ukraine, so what. Billions
Mon Apr 20, 2020, 08:46 PM
Apr 2020

go missing, been there and seen that. There is nothing the GAO can say that will shock or change America. Fox will say it’s fake and we at DU will jump up and down and cry foul but in the end they cannot tell us anything that compares to what we already know. I’m over the corruption and I am in revenge mode. AOC or Harris as Attorney General with both Houses Dem and a Dem president then I will care again. When the indictments are handed down and impeachment of Kavenaugh starts then I will give a shit about GAO reports. Until then it’s business as usual, corruption wins, we lose.

Lord Ludd

(585 posts)
6. To Daily Kos - GAO stands for Government Accountability Office
Mon Apr 20, 2020, 09:00 PM
Apr 2020

It was formerly known as the General Accounting Office, which incorrectly implied that it had some connection to financial issues.

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