While I will assume this is a witch hunt, I will still state that every public department at every level (city, county, state, federal) should be subject to continuous GAAP audits every quarter to identify waste, fraud, abuse, and opportunities for saving taxpayers money.
I will further state that such an audit should consist of a random non-government employee CPA (required to support to sustain his licensure), and 3 non-CPA, non-government citizens. Audit to consist of 1 week per quarter. All to be paid the same as for jury duty and afforded the same protections. Each quarter required to be different non-government personnel. Each quarter required to audit prior 2 quarters and current quarter. No citizen to serve more than one quarter (week) per year).
I used to manage the organizational credit card for a small Pentagon group (150 folks). About every three months, the audit folks would call up and want to talk about a purchase. It would take me about 90 minutes to dig out the paperwork, research the facts, and then I’d have to write a three page explanation over the purchase. For items costing $5k to $100k...it made sense.
One day, they called me up and identified a special screwdriver kit which cost $8, which we had purchased. I went back....researched the whole thing. We had actually avoided GSA and normal path....using just the local hardware shop, and I could even show the homework done....we saved around $3 over the GSA pricing. So then I got around to the paperwork involved and the report. There was probably $100 of man-hours involved....over an audit of a $8 screwdriver kit. I felt silly but at least it proved that audits work the way they are supposed.
A decade ago, I had a conversation with a contractor who led a bid deal for his company that was worth around $100 million a year. The government contract specified that they had have x-number of employees to provide x-work. No problem. Then it specified that they had to have three PhD professor-types. My contractor questioned this and bluntly told the government guy that this was a total waste of manpower for what they were doing. On top of that...each of the PhD guys had to have a secretary, and private office space. It was a total waste but the government guy mandated this. After winning the bid, then came the problem of trying to hire the PhD guys. One of them wanted the company to privately ship his horse from west coast to this site in Virginia.