I did a search of the SDMB and couldn’t find any threads on this subject; thought for sure there would be. Anyhoo, I don’t understand how this could happen in a public agency. I used to work for a local government in the D. C. area, and developed the budget for a division level office. The agency’s proposed budget was made public. True, salaries of employees (at whatever level) were not specified in the public document, but internally we knew the salaries of our employees, administrators, and executives. Salaries such as those of the Bell City officials would have received extraordinary scrutiny, and if they had been implemented, the local journalists, including the Washington Post, would have found out about it. So how did these Bell City officials get away with it for so long?
You do have to wonder - were all the councillors in on it? Did nobody attend council meetings, or was this salary structure set in secret? Was everyone who lived there a bunch of sheep, or was the police department used to “ensure civic order”? The fact that the police chief was in on the deal suggests that the police made sure nobody objected or raised the issue.
If it does turn out to be illegal, it will probably be because some laws about openness of government were broken.
The trouble with this setup is that everyone will want a piece. A front-line policeman is not going to be a bully for $40,000 a year when the chief gets 10 times as much. The tax rate could maybe support a few freeloaders but not everyone on the city payroll being grossly overpaid.
I’d be curious to know what happens with these guys.
I heard on NPR the other night that Bell’s population is largely low income and non-English speaking. Not surprising that if you can get enough people on the take in that situation that you could keep things under the radar.
The most surprising thing to me was looking at Bell on google maps just now. I hadn’t really payed attention to where exactly it was. Hearing that it was a small city of ~30K, I was picturing some semi-secluded rural town. It is six miles from downtown LA!
Start with reading this Los Angeles Times article: “Prosecutors detail steps Bell leaders allegedly took to hide high salaries”. The LA Times has been covering this story extensively since July, when it broke the story.
The AM news ran mug shots of 8 of these city officials today. Seems the long arm of the law reached out and touched them. Imagine a city manager receiving $800,000/year for a city of 40k. (or so the news reported)
It’s a fascinating story. The city manager had orchestrated a convoluted series of contracts and assignments that resulted in all these high salaries.
The people who knew about it were all getting paid.
Catching one person committing fraud, is much easier than catching several people working together to committ fraud. Internal controls are normally designed to detect and catch the single person, but when you have multiple people involved it is easier to override the internal controls that may have been put in place.
Yes, essentially everybody who knew about it was in on it. It’s one of the biggest conspiracies in local government I’ve ever heard of.
I was treasurer of my church for a few years. the reaction of most people to budget and money issues really surprised me. As soon as anything about money was raised, 95% of the time people’s eyes would glaze over and they’d just shut down. They asked me where something was stated on a spread sheet, even if it was listed, in bold letters, right in front of them.
I wouldn’t underestimate the aversion most people have to numbers as a factor in letting it go on so long.
I would tend to agree with Long Time First Time. Assume, as with any bureaucracy, that there are already people in place who seem to be there for no purpose other than to make everything harder for people to do. Now incentivize those people to cover each other’s asses with outside contracts paid to each other as ‘consultants’ or people who are ‘on call’ for extended overtime periods where they earn extra cash that may not be reported as straight salary.
Now take a small city that probably flies under the radar anyway from an audit standpoint with a working class population that neither understands how to navigate the bureaucracy, has the time to do so, nor wants to risk any kind of retribution for sticking their neck out and you have a recipe for corruption.
Years ago, I was doing some Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance consulting for a non-profit organization that functioned largely using city and county funds to provide free HIV screening and counseling to illegal aliens and the homeless, as well as infant health supplies to the very poor. The type of people who worked there were pretty sketchy, including quite a few ex-cons. I remember specifically asking as part of my analysis, “if the homeless people have no address and the illegal aliens are constantly moving, how can anyone audit and confirm the counseling really happened and that the infant health supplies were really delivered?” I was told, “well our employees go in pairs, so they keep each other honest”. Yeah, right. So fast forward a year and there is a huge scandal because, surprise, the pairs of ex-cons agreed to both not do their job and make up fake counseling visits, and the ones who were supposed to deliver infant health supplies were teaming up to sell them and make money on the side. They correctly guessed that the poor and the homeless weren’t going to call and complain if they didn’t get the supplies, because in many cases they didn’t know when and if they were supposed to get them, and they didn’t know how to complain. Well, apparently at least one did to cause the scandal…
Our small town (about 25K) population is slightly affluent and well educated with a lot of involvement in public affairs - which sounds quite a bit different from Bell city.
We also have severe budget problems with cuts to public safety and education workers and services.
Consequently people watch the Selecmen’s meetings like a hawk, and pour over the budget in detail - the high level summary is handed out at Town Meeting and the full body is available at Town Hall.
It would be pretty tough to pull off something here like the Bell city thing.
Affluence and education, however, are exactly the ingredients that affords your population both the spare time and understanding of what is going on so that they can watch for corruption.
If you are a blue collar worker with multiple jobs and barely able to make ends meet, you probably wouldn’t understand the budget even if it was readily available, and you certainly wouldn’t use what little spare time you had to attend council meeting.
I think another problem is the death of small town newspapers. I lived in a small town in NJ which had its own paper (since gone) and there is still a surrounding township weekly, with one reporter who lives in town. A local reporter would figure out something like this, and be right on it because of the possibility of getting the story picked up by a wider market. It is good the LA Times ran with it, but they hardly have the resources to understand the politics of all surrounding small towns.
Very good point. I’m constantly annoyed at the lack of coverage our medium-sized suburb gets in the regional large metropolitan dailies. There’s pretty much never an article unless there’s something major, like a murder.