Watchdog Bytes

State agency investigated zero complaints in 2008 -- and it only took them 120 days to do it

Kudos to the Texas Board of Professional Geoscientists (not to be confused with the amateur geoscientists who wouldn’t know their soil from Shinola).

Professional geoscientists perform underground mapping and sampling, three-dimensional geoscientific interpretation and modeling, oil and gas exploration and lots of other cool sounding stuff. They can probably change their own oil, too.

So why praise the board? Because it somehow managed to open a complaint investigation on July 16, 2007 and closed it on Nov. 13, 2007, without actually having a complaint to investigate.

Yeah, we didn’t get it either. Over the summer a TCU intern, Andrew Young, asked the board for complaint data. This week, Watchdog did a little number crunching to come up with this nifty chart on resolution of complaints:

Fiscal year	Total complaints	Average Days
2007	4	51.5
2008	0	120
2009	5	106

But we still couldn’t figure out the 2008 pretend complaint that took so long to investigate. So Watchdog contacted the Legislative Budget Board, to which state agencies report various statistics, including complaint resolution times.

Here’s what the geo board reported to the LBB:

Fiscal year	Target (days)	Actual days	Pct Annual target
2007	110	92	83.64
2008	110	0	0
2009	110	98	89.09

So well done, geo guys, on getting each of your nine actual complaints investigated in fewer than 110 days. But Watchdog would have enjoyed talking to the board’s interim executive director or investigator about the three months and 28 days it took to resolve no complaints in 2008. Most likely it was a glitch caused by the way you calculate investigations during a fiscal year.

No one called back, though. (And, for the record, we used an actual phone.)

 

Forget the subpoena, just gimme that Post-it Note

   Did you see last week's story about how the big American telecom companies fell all over themselves giving the FBI illegal access to the personal phone records of Americans  without subpoenas? Procedures are in place so that proper legal paperwork must be filed to give law enforcement access to our personal phone records. But after Sept. 11, 2001, that kinda went out the window, according to the U.S. Justice Department's Inspector General.

   One particular piece of this, as reported by former Star-Telegram reporter Marissa Taylor, now working for our McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau, is this:

   "In some cases, FBI agents didn't even bother with the letters and simply asked in e-mails or Post-It notes for records related to more than 3,500 telephone numbers."

   Watchdog Bytes wonders what those Post-it Notes looked like. Here are some possibilities:

    

All of this is too informal for us.

The Founding Fathers used much larger paper for their writings.

They created something called the Fourth Amendment:

“

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. " -- Dave Lieber/Star-Telegram Watchdog Columnist

FBI: Your information request is headed for the "backlog" ... muwhahahahahaha!

Dear FBI,

Thank you ever so much for your letter of Jan. 15 (but postmarked on Jan. 20 – must be a long walk to the mail room). 

As you know,on Sept. 24 Watchdog got the out-of-this-world idea of asking you what it cost taxpayers to run the Fort Worth FBI field office. In December, you felt we had waited long enough to ask us to abandon our request. This left us feeling like we had paid for dinner and a movie only to get the kiss off. But we stuck by you, because we’re interested in commitment and because we get paid for this.

Now comes your letter. Thanks for letting us know, about three months later, that you are looking around for the budget. (We know you left it somewhere. Have you looked under the cable bill?)Thanks also for letting us know that once you find the documents, they’ll be forwarded to: the “perfected backlog.” According to the FBI’s Web site a “perfected backlog case” means “the request ... has been completed and is ready to assign to the next available [legal administrative specialist] for review of electronic documents for release.”

Whatever happens, Watchdog just wants you to know that as far as we’re concerned, you have perfected the backlog and then some.

We’ve also started an office pool for when we’ll get the documents. We took 2014.

Want in? 

Sincerely,  

The Watchdog

--Darren Barbee

Is that my toe burning?

 

   It wasn't easy grabbing that flashlight and magnifying glass and crawling under the desk to read the ultra-tiny serial numbers on the back of my Belkin surge protector to see if I was a candidate for electrocution, but that's what I did after seeing a little item buried in the back

pages of the February issue of PC World magazine. 

   If you're reading this Watchdog Bytes on a computer (and the only other way is on mobile device), you probably have a surge protector under your desk. They are supposed to protect your electronics from power surges and lightning strikes. (I have them all over my house and even have a "master" surge protector on the main power line into the house — a relatively new product.)

   But Belkin, working with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, is recalling 68,000 SurgeMaster surge protectors because they have plastic moldings that could crack and lead to electrical shocks. (No cases reported yet, though.)

   Models affected are: F9G930-10, F9G930-v10, F9G930-10-W, F9G930G-CL and F9G930-10-SN.

   Turns out my Belkin isn't listed. But if yours is, call Belkin at 1-800-952-1465 or order a free replacement. Customers who own one of these products can telephone Belkin at 1-800-952-1465 or order a free replacement. Visit www.belkin.com/recall.

-- Dave Lieber/Fort Worth Star-Telegram Watchdog columnist

$93,300 for ballgame tickets is a legit campaign expense?

Now this is the kind of math any politician likes: $93,300 for Houston Texans and Houston Astros tickets MINUS a Texas Ethics Commission fine of $3,400 EQUALS $89,900 of fun, fun, fun.

The ethics commission recently decided that when state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, purchased tickets and bridal gifts they were legitimate campaign expenses.

Whitmire told the commission "I gave the tickets to charity auctions, supporters and contributors, and constituents.”

 The Houston Chronicle also reported that a Montgomery County commissioner used campaign funds to buy a fish fryer, a printer, a golf cart, a desk chair, a storage building, an antenna, a computer, gift certificates and a cooker from February 2006 through May 2007. The value of the items totaled $14,820.

The commissioner was fined a crushing $500. Hope he gets to keep the fish fryer, cause those things are cool.

Watchdog can't help but paraphrase a line from Apocalypse Now: Accusing politicians of ethics violations in Texas is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

-- Darren Barbee

Feds (once again) paying for corpses' expenses

It’s time for another edition of Dead People Getting Taxpayer Money.

When it comes to government subsidized housing, the deceased are living it up. Taxpayers “conservatively paid” more than $15.2 million for 3,995 voucher program households that had at least one deceased family member.

The moolah for a ghoul-a program was apparently paid because public housing agencies were doing what many bureaucracies do best: ignoring chastising reports. In 2008, agencies were informed that 12,667 subsidized households had one or more deceased tenants in the public housing and voucher program, according to an audit by the Fort Worth office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development inspector general.

HUD had urged the agencies to stop paying ineligible and unsupported rental assistance. HUD had also implemented a deceased tenants report and checked for invalid Social Security numbers. What the department didn’t do was monitor local agencies’ actions, including whether they helped out with rent for not-quite-alive lodgers.

Maybe HUD should have sent the report via Ouija board — since the housing agencies shelled out anyway.

The inspector general says HUD should require the agencies to show some kind of support for the payments or pay back the money.

Who says the government doesn’t have stiff penalties?

— Darren Barbee

New low: Taking money away from service-disabled veterans

Service-disabled veterans are losing out on contracts meant for them to some lowlifes and frauds.

In a investigation of 10 firms indentified by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, genuine veteran-run businesses lost out on about $100 million in contracts through fraud, abuse or both. The businesses that were caught faced no consequences, were allowed in some cases to complete contracts and were not suspended or debarred. 

In one case, contracts for Hurricane Katrina trailer maintenance went to a firm whose owner was not a service-disabled veteran. In other cases, companies were used as pass-throughs for large multinational corporations. In another, a full-time federal contract employee at an Air Force base set up a disabled veteran company that passed a $900,000 furniture contract on to a company where his wife works, which in turn passed the work to a furniture manufacturer.

The GAO also found that the government does not have effective fraud-prevention controls in place for the veterans’ program.

As a result:

* A maintenance company was awarded $7.5 million despite the owner not being a service-disabled veterans. The company continues to receive tens of millions in other contracts.

* A construction and janitorial service was awarded $5 million but was ineligible because it does not perform any work and subcontracts 100 percent of the work to a contracts who isn’t a disabled veteran.

* A septic tank company received a $200,000 contract but was ineligible for the program because an ineligible business performs the contract work.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is developing a database to validate genuine disabled veterans businesses. However, the database is only being used for VA contracts, according to the GAO.

Darren Barbee