Monday, July 21, 2008

Accounting Mistake Vastly Overvalues Katrina Aid

Nice.

The General Services Administration, which manages federal property, over-counted cases of toilet paper, plastic sporks and other cutlery, by mistakenly counting a single item as being worth as much as multiple items contained in a package of goods.

The original GSA estimate of $85 million should have been $18.5 million, according to figures released by GSA and FEMA.

The household goods were supposed to go to people whose homes were destroyed by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. But the items were stored in warehouses in Louisiana, and then Fort Worth, Texas. A recent CNN investigative story exposed that those materials never made it to storm victims.

GSA officials were asked recently to reassess the total cost of donated items in what the agency called a routine audit.

“In doing so, it was determined that some of the unit costs were ‘eaches’ and others were ‘for-case’ lots. The final adjustments reveal there was a significant overstatement in the total asset valuation,” GSA officials reported to FEMA, which released the findings Monday.

This is my favorite part:

GSA spokeswoman Viki Reath said Monday she would investigate whether it is unusual for the agency to make such a large accounting mistake.

I HOPE NOT!!!

(1) Comments
Posted by Owen at 2048 hrs
Politics + Politics - General

  1. Wasn’t Jim Sensenbrenner crititized quite loudly when he raised this issue?

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on July 22, 2008 at 1018 hrs


Commenting is not available in this channel entry.