The other shoe has dropped. And to be honest, the problem was surfaced by a Republican Congressman, Mike Conway, a CPA in real life, who tried to speak to the auditors who had audited the NRCC (National Republican Campaign Committee - the Republican organization of Congressmen who work to get more Republicans elected to Congress.) Mike was having trouble even getting a copy of the audit report from Christopher Ward who was the NRCC's treasurer. There was a good reason why Mike was having trouble getting the audit report. There was none.
As Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker reported, Christopher Ward has been forging an audit report for several years. Since Rep Conway wanted to speak to the auditors, that wasn't good enough. There were no auditors to speak to.
The New York Times reports this morning that the FBI is now investigating because "...hundreds of thousands of dollars are missing and presumed stolen" from the NRCC. Chris Ward is no longer employed by the NRCC, and is the target of the FBI's investigation.
For decades now the Republican free traders have been reducing oversight on various financial and non-financial activities by making regulations less explicit and by reducing oversight. The results have been increased danger to consumers (lead in children's toys), increased environmental destruction, incompetent and even crooked mortgage lending, and frauds like this one perpetuated on the NRCC itself. While most people are honest in most ways, they cannot be trusted to be honest if they are not checked on. There has to be oversight.
Without audits, taxpayers will not pay their taxes or keep honest books. This is just one more example of the wrongheadedness of the Reagan Revolution's complaint of "Get the government off our backs." That complaint was primarily started by people who did not want to put in the effort of doing their job accurately and keeping good records, a characteristic (in my opinion) of many otherwise excellent salespeople.
Now the Republican complaint of "Get government off our backs" has come back to bite the Republican Party in the rear end - again.
My earlier post on this subject can be seen here along with a link to an earlier report by The Politico.
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