NASHVILLE—The New Year is here and, thus far, of all the priorities Tennessee legislators have laid out for the 2015 General Assembly, none involve clamping down on government employees who steal from taxpayers.
Auditors with the state Comptroller’s Office in 2014 continued to churn out audits showing that government employees who have sole access to taxpayer money are tempted to steal it.
In one notable instance, a former Alcoa City School District employee who oversaw federal funds took nearly $500,000 in taxpayer money and used some of it on her iTunes account.
Auditors are often the first to discover the thefts, but it’s the job of managers at the local level to detect these thefts in the first place, auditor Ben Vance said.
“It’s the management’s responsibility. He or she is responsible for internal control. We don’t go in there to look for fraud,” Vance said. “We certainly assess the risk and let that bear into what we’re looking at, but the management is responsible for that.”
Thieves who work for government entities, Vance said, catch on to the fact that taxpayer money is for the taking. Elected officials and other government employees often aren’t monitoring government spending carefully enough, he said.
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“They’re ignorant [of] it, and then they find out someone has been stealing from them for years and they’re just shocked because they haven’t been doing their own jobs,” Vance said.
So what can state legislators do?
Very little, it seems.
“The only thing we can do at the state level is increase the penalties for theft,” said former State Rep. Kent Williams, I-Elizabethton, in 2013.
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