Watching The Watchers

My dear friend and co-founder of True North Andy What's-his-name had a post up yesterday about the National Taxpayers Union Congressional Report Card. In it he (and the NTU) were down on Senator Coleman - giving him a grade of C-. I just have one problem with the National Taxpayers Union Report Card. It only records votes. It does not record things like this from ABC News.

Talk about eating at the government trough. Some $13,000 of your tax money was spent on steak, crab and 40 bottles of wine at one high-end steakhouse chain for 81 postal service workers — a $160 per person meal — and it was all charged to government purchase cards.
A National Science Foundation worker used her card to spend $1,800 for manicures and cosmetics at a nail salon chain. One NASA employee spent $800 on two video iPods for so-called data storage, when he was actually storing his personal songs and videos.
"If you don't watch the pennies, they become millions, and if you don't watch the hundreds and thousands, they become billions," Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said.
But who is watching? Forest Service employee Debra Durfey, 50, of Echo, Ore., used the program to write checks to her live-in boyfriend amounting to $640,000, over six years spent on gambling and mortgage payments. But no one ever noticed.
"It took a whistleblower to find out that she had written 180 checks to her boyfriend — it's the kind of problem that gets recognized immediately in the private sector," said Tom Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste.
"Unfortunately, with our tax dollars at stake, it takes a lot more time to find out what's going on."
The government cards actually streamline the purchasing process, saving Uncle Sam about $2 billion a year. But the abuse and poor accounting cost millions, as in the case of four defense department workers who spent $77,000 on clothes and custom-made Brooks Brothers suits for service members. The suits were charged to their cards and cost three times the government allowance.

Senator Coleman has used his bully pulpit in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to go after waste and fraud like this. As chairman, he was the one that finally started any investigations into the UN's Oil for Food Program scandal! Why does he do this? Because unlike our Junior Senator, he understands...

Coleman said, "Average people, regular businesses, take a look at expenses and purchases like this and have, in place, systems. Government should not be held to a lesser standard, if anything, the same or higher standard because it's not our money, it's your money."

The NTU would be wise to keep these kinds of taxpayer friendly actions in mind for their next report card.