Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Quis costodiet ipsos custodes?

Several members of the Internal Revenue Service have been busted for tax fraud.  Apparently these fine upstanding public servants falsely claimed a credit for first time home ownership.  Pardon me if I don't seem surprised.

This is a problem you find with large organizations.  There is a sort of herd immunity from culpability, so it becomes easier to abuse the trust of those they are pledged to serve.  If you're just one of several thousand people who do your job, then it's easy to either coast at a minimum level of effort or to abuse your position for personal gain and not get caught.

One of the reasons I support a winnowing of the government workforce is that a smaller workforce will be easier to monitor for such corruption and malingering.  If there are fewer IRS employees, it will be easier to find those who are not serving the public in the way they should.

The same goes for every other government bureaucracy.  My formula for making government cheaper and cleaner is not complicated:  Simplify the laws, cut the staff, ruthlessly enforce standards of conduct, and improve efficiency.

1 comment:

Old NFO said...

Agree with ALL of those...

Creative Commons License
DaddyBear's Den by DaddyBear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at daddybearden.blogspot.com.