But it will require some intelligence!
Saw this article today talking about an agency that was hired to provide assistance payments to Katrina victims.
Now, other than a smarmy “You’re doing a great job Brownie!”, I won’t take the easy path and denigrate the stupidity of yet another bureaucracy. Nor will I call into question their intelligence when they managed to pay the maximum payout of $150,000 to people who didn’t qualify at all for the program. I also won’t cast aspersions on their integrity just because the only way this “leaked” out was that they had to put out a contract to hire a collection firm to help them get the money returned.
I will give them the benefit of the doubt because they had a
“sense of urgency in paying Road Home applicants, and ICF knew applicants might eventually have to return some money.”
Here however is the money line of the article:
Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a 4-percent error rate for the Road Home that is “quite good for large federal programs.”
Let’s see, the current Federal budget is $3.1 trillion dollars. If 4% of that is just “error”, we have $124 Billion we should be able to take out of the budget just by hiring a few people that are smarter than your average fifth grader! Of course Brann thinks 4% is “quite good”, probably representing an “A” or “A-” in government speak. If that’s so, the average error rate is probably more like 6% – 7% or around $200 Billion dollars.
The current budget deficit is estimated to be around $400 Billion. I think we’ve just found a way to cut that in half!
