Folly of the DayMedicare Spent $587.7 Million on Five Drugs Anyone Could Buy Off a Shelf. The FDA Had Moved Them Over the Counter More Than a Year Before the Payments Started.
Nothing was stolen here. The money went out through a system operating exactly as designed, paying prescription prices for a tube of gel that was, throughout, on sale beside the crisps. The figure that matters is not the total but the trend — $184 million, then $194.5 million, then $209.1 million — an institution large enough to be told its own facts and to go on transacting as though it had not been. This is not greed. It is an organisation reading last year's label with this year's chequebook, and doing so with perfect confidence.
Source: Healthcare Dive (reporting the HHS Office of Inspector General audit)
The WireThe City of Culture Trust Collapsed Owing the Council More Than £1.5 Million. The Regulator Has Now Found Its Trustees Left the Money to the Executives and Did Not Look.
A board is not a decorative object. It exists so that someone in the room asks the question no executive wants asked, and the Commission has described a trusteeship that never got round to asking it. What is being censured is not theft but a category error — the belief that being made a custodian of a city's culture was itself the doing of something.
Source: GOV.UK — Charity Commission
The WireThe Town Paid $54,324.75 for a New Logo. Council Threw Out the First One in June, Threw Out the Rewrite in August, and a Resident Found a Near-Identical Design Online for About $10.
The consultants' real product was never a mark; it was permission — the assurance that a town's sense of itself had been arrived at professionally rather than merely felt. Two years of engagement and fifty-four thousand dollars later, the deliverable turns out to be an idea a stranger had already had, and was selling for ten.
Source: Grimsby Citizens for Responsible Growth (report of the 11 August council meeting)
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The University Council Approved A$250 Million of Cuts Without Clear Evidence They Were Needed. It Then Spent A$35 Million on Redundancies and A$1.2 Million Asking Consultants What It Had Done.
Note what the auditors did not find: a crisis. The governing body of a research university — an assembly selected precisely for its capacity to weigh evidence — reached a nine-figure decision by the route everybody else uses, which is that it felt like the sort of thing that ought to be done. The recommendation that the council obtain advice it can more readily understand is the most quietly devastating sentence written about a board this year.
Source: Times Higher Education (reporting the ANAO audit)
The WireFour Years of 'Delay and Drift' Over Some Shipping Containers. The Ombudsman's Remedy Is an Apology and £300.
Enforcement is the part of planning where a council must actually decide something and be seen to have decided it, which is precisely why four years went by. Nothing was refused; nothing was permitted; a file simply aged. Three hundred pounds is not compensation. It is the price of the admission.
Source: Local Government Lawyer
The WireThe Animal Husbandry Department Accepted ₹3.08 Crore of Veterinary Medicine Without the Mandatory Quality-Test Reports. Ten Samples Failed. Seventy-Eight Per Cent of the Substandard Stock Had Already Been Used.
The quality-test report is not paperwork about the medicine; it is the only part of the transaction that distinguishes buying medicine from buying liquid. Eight hundred and eighty-five times the department decided it did not need to know, and by the time anybody checked, the answer had already been administered.
Source: Hindustan Times
The WireThe Report Is Titled 'FEMA Wasted Millions of Dollars in Public Assistance Small Project Grants'. That Is Not a Critic's Headline. That Is the Agency's Own Inspector General.
There is a whole genre of official document that spends forty careful pages arriving at a conclusion it would never print on the cover. This is not one of them. When the in-house auditor has stopped reaching for the euphemism, the interesting question is no longer what happened — it is how long everybody had been declining to say so.
Source: DHS Office of Inspector General
Black-Robed EgomaniaThe Judge Who Rules on Whether Employers Took Too Long Was Forty-Six Judgments Behind, and Told None of His Leadership Judges.
An employment tribunal exists so that a person kept waiting by an institution may at last have the institution explained to it. Forty-six times, the institution doing the explaining was the one keeping people waiting. But the sanction does not really turn on the delay — it turns on the silence. A judge who does not report himself has quietly concluded that his is the one case that need not be listed.
Source: The Law Society Gazette (reporting the JCIO disciplinary statement)
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