Fighting government waste in NC
Andrew Henson of the Raleigh-based Civitas Institute has been doing great work exposing government waste in the field of childcare in North Carolina. In his first piece on the subject published in January, Henson wrote about how Child Care Services Association (CCSA) abruptly dropped 250 children who had been supported by Smart Start Scholarship, a program for government subsidized childcare. CCSA claimed that these actions were a result of state budget cuts. However, Henson claims that the real culprit is massive mismanagement of taxpayer funds by CCSA:
CCSA’s budget numbers reveal an exorbitant amount of spending leading up to the mid-year budget cuts. While CCSA was budgeted $3.4 million for fiscal year 2010-11, which spans from July 1 to June 30, a report showed that 6 months into the fiscal year they had already spent over two thirds of their budget, spending at a pace that would have overspent their total budgeted amount by $1.2 million by the end of the year. Serious questions remain as to how such a gross structural deficit could have gone unnoticed or unreported.
Needless to say, CCSA was not happy with Henson's expose. In response, the agency stated that “CCSA has consistently been awarded a clean bill of financial health," and claimed that Henson “used aggressive, inappropriate and threatening tactics to bully CCSA” to supply him with information.
Read more here
Social Networks for YAL