It’s easy to balance the budget when you make $32 billion of “mistakes” all going in the same direction to make your budget look better than it really is. And millions of willfully ignorant drones in this country want government to have more power, more control, and more of our money. Then they try to blame libertarians for the fucked up state of this country.
How “Accounting Mistakes” Cost California Taxpayers $32 Billion This Year
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/01/2014 20:06 -0400
Spend more than 30 minutes watching TV in California and you will be bombarded by politicians proclaiming they single-handedly balanced the budget, brought prosperity back to the Silicon Valley alone, and turned water into wine. Yet, oddly, there is one thing none of them seem too quick to admit to. As CBS reports, the state office in charge of keeping track of California taxpayers’ money made tens of billions of accounting mistakes. CBS added it up and came up with a big number: $31.65 billion in errors. That’s more than the gross domestic product of Iceland and Jamaica combined.
Controller John Chiang’s office is the state’s financial watchdog, but an audit by the Bureau of State Audits claims the office’s accounting is off by billions of dollars.
The audit revealed:
- $7.7 billion – Understated federal trust fund revenues and expenditures
- $653 million – Overstated general fund assets and revenues
- $8 billion – Overstated California State University’s bond debt
- $9.1 billion – Reporting error that understated a public building construction fund
- Also there was a deferred tax-revenue figure posted as $6.2 billion when it was actually $6.2 million.
All told, that’s more than $31 billion in mistakes.
Sacramento State accounting professor John Corless agrees with auditors saying those glaring mistakes should have been caught by somebody.
“Someone’s not using their equipment right, and they’re not using their heads,” he said.
Republican consultant Mitch Zak is calling for an investigation.
“It’s offensive as a taxpayer,” he said. “There’s no consideration it appears if they misstate or mismanage my tax dollars that there’s any retribution.”
Chiang is running for state treasurer. His aides refused to go on camera for this story.
They said they concur with the assessment, and they blame high staff turnover and a lack of qualified staff, budget cuts, and late and incorrect data from numerous agencies.
Of course, we are sure that no one knows anything about it; no one is responsible for the errors; no one is accountable for the missing money; but a full-scale probe-y investigation will be launched… well played government. Doesn’t matter after all – it’s not their money.
Math, it’s wicked hahd. At least for government drones.
Bob.
I see why liberals hate math.It slaps them into reality .
I was once a headhunter for accounting professionals. Over five years I tested hundreds and hundreds of accounting/bookkeeping/tax “professionals.”
I learned that those that understood the least were predominately employed in government.
Accounting specialists with little to no basic understanding of accounting, or math.
Hell, they were so inept that the vast majority had zero understanding of private industry, nor their own benefit packages.
I was forced to create a spreadsheet that would show them the present day value of their future pensions, and current days off and health insurance values.
They all thought they were dramatically underpaid and routinely denied even the most basic of paid time off, while overwhelmingly having benefit packages that equated to millions of dollars of future earnings, benefits and paid time off on a scale that 95% of private jobs would never, ever, match.
Not so amazing that out of the dozens and dozens (if not hundreds) of unionized workers, I only found ONE that came to me knowing what the tradeoffs were. One.
And that was 15+ years ago.
Idiots abound, and now they totally rule our world.
The Cali bureaucrats are a product of Common Cores math .They aren’t wrong as long as they can explain how they got their figures…it’s called the “New Age Of Accounting “……brought to you by Jerry ” Moon Beam ” Brown .
I wonder if common core math will work for the IRS at audit time?
“You see Mr. IRS auditor, because I carried the one here eleven times, I’m entitled to an $11 million dollar refund. Pay up bitchez!”
Government can make mistakes that amount to billions—OH well – Gee how did that happen?
But if you make one mistake even as small as one dollar on your taxes, now THAT is a big deal and the IRS or the State will move heaven and earth to collect that dollar.
The headline of the ZH article is bullshit. Accounting mistakes do not always cost money. These in all likelihood did not. They are stupid, incompetent reporting mistakes, but they did not cost money, best I can tell.
When an accountant overstates profit, for instance – that results in actual loss of money via taxes, or when debtors or creditors are miscalculated, that too results or can result in lost money.
But these errors are more meant to mislead.
When the bank ccount runs dry,they will get an accounting lesson.