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Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Corruption. What’d we expect?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The indictment Tuesday of a Fairburn businessman for allegedly bribing a former Atlanta Public School system technology director is an example of what can go wrong when unaccountable people are spending free money.
A federal grand jury indicted R. Clay Harris of Fairburn for allegedly paying $230,000 in bribes to Arthur Scott, the former APS technology director. Scott pleaded guilty in May to taking a total of $323,000 in bribes. His wife, Evelyn Myers Scott, pleaded guilty to wire and mail fraud conspiracy. Scott is cooperating with investigators and neither he nor his wife has yet been sentenced.
Harris’ technology company, Multimedia Communications Services, received more than $11 million over a two-year period from a federal E-rate program directing money to schools and libraries to build the infrastructure for high-speed Internet access, reports the AJC’s Ken Foskett and Paul Donsky.
The money came from a tax levied on consumer telephone bills and the spending program was administered by a quasi-governmental agency attached to the Federal Communications Commission.
It was a program on automatic pilot. Money accumulated and was spent, about $2 billion a year. The Atlanta school system spent more than $73 million, mostly federal money, between 1998 and 2002. Atlanta, under Scott’s direction, built one of the costliest and most sophisticated networks of any school district in the country. Harris’ company was among those given no-bid contracts.
Vendors were routinely paid too much and the system spent millions of dollars on gear that it didn’t need, Foskett and Donsky found in an series that prompted the federal investigation.
Here are the lessons:
No tax or “fee” should be levied for a specified purpose. If it’s important to do and a tax is warranted, it should go into the general treasury to be appropriated annually based on demonstrated need.
When individuals or local governments are spending “free” money, the sky’s the limit. Prices don’t matter, nor does actual need.
When it’s somebody else’s money, nobody’s in charge. Clearly they weren’t in the Atlanta school system.
When an obscure, unaccountable bureaucracy is doling out money with no expertise and no oversight, corruption is inevitable.
When politicians are spending based on good intentions, while providing for no accountability, the program is a boondoggle and can never be anything else.
No-bid contracts, except in dire emergencies or where no competitor exists, are invitations to cronyism and corruption. The era of set-asides and other competition-limiting purchasing practices should come to an end. Every contract should go to the lowest bidder capable of providing the goods or services.
Nobody accountable. No oversight. No bid. What’d we expect?
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