Tavares, FL - March 20, 2012
I found a new website that is run by a number pf public integrity types of organizations, and they rank all the States by several categories and rank their "Corruption Risk".
Here is Florida's page, which shows abysmal rankings in most categories, and an average C- in Corruption Risk . Even with that ranking, they are 18th out of all the states, which shows how much worse other states are.
http://www.stateintegrity.org/florida
I noticed that they ranked "Internal Audit" as one of the only "A" categories, so I posted this comment:
As a former corporate internal audit director, Certified Internal Auditor and anti-corruption adviser, I was amazed to see you give Florida an A for internal audit. I write a blog on local Lake County, FL government agency fiscal fiascos and mis-management at www.FiscalRangers.com . After five years of monitoring issues here, I do not believe there is ANY oversight on about 2000 local government agencies comparable to what I saw in Fortune 500 firms, the County of Los Angeles or even the Federal government. They may do nice, clean "financial audits" but the Inspector General has no authority to initiate performance or internal audits of local agencies, including water districts, hospital districts, special tax districts, etc.
There are no requirements for independent County auditors and the audits conducted by the Florida Inspector General are conducted by CPA's, not CIA's or CFE's to catch performance and efficiency problems.
For instance, we had a local Hospital tax district that existed for 40 years without ANY spending rules on how more than $10-million would be spent by two named non-profit hospitals. They could spend it on pink flamingos for the lawn and be legal. It took locals 4 years to finally get a Legislator who wrote a much improved bill governing them, and it was barely passed recently due to insider tricks by a Hospital supported State Senatory.
You might find one internal "operational audit" of a single Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) by the Inspector General, but if lots of problems are found, they don't go out and review the other CRA's for similar problems. Florida is still a Huckster State with little oversight. The one benefit is a good sunshine law, so local people can do their own research to find stupid government practices. My mantra is that government should be run as well as corporations, and Florida local government agencies lack professional oversight from the State or local internal auditors, and waste is rampant. .
vj
