And of course to help you suck up some government funding for your “advocacy.”
If you can wade through all the bureaucratic quadruple-speak, Svetlana Voreskova, your quote above is a a good cue for me to share with you yet another example of how this business of “government funding for advocacy” works in the real world.
As you know, I have been reading these DOJ/OIG audit reports on grant recipients under the Violence Against Women Act in the US, for several years now.
Usually, as in nine out of ten times a new report is published, there is a page in it called “schedule of dollar-related findings” where the amounts of federal grant funds that have gone improperly- or outright un-accounted for are listed. This is the page in the typical report that provides the key to reading the rest of it; some of them will show hundreds of thousands or more dollars misspent or gone missing, and then one can read through the remainder of the document to see what they were supposed to be doing with the money, versus the often laughably lame excuses offered by the grantee as to how or why they just did something else with it instead.
But this latest one, is one of the rare ones. There is no “schedule of dollar-related findings” at all. Leading one to think maybe at first glance that, gee whiz, for once one of these rackets followed the rules and didn’t just go handing out federal money in envelopes of cash to all their friends and political allies.
But a more thorough reading of the rest of the report, suggests otherwise. One little anecdote which provides a clue to the mutual hand-washing that goes on, is a story of how the org spent almost four times what was authorized on “copier service”, whereupon the matter is swept away neatly:
The Director of Finance told us that the unallowable charge resulted from a data entry error in the Coalition’s financial system, which is QuickBooks. We consider this cost immaterial and consequently make no recommendation.
Translation:
Grantee: Oh, that… yeah, some schlub with authorized access to our accounting system didn’t get the memo on how we meant to hide the hundred-fifty bucks we tipped the Xerox lady who’s a friend of the Director, so gosh, Our Bad….
Feds: (winking) hey, “if it helps protect just one woman”, right? What’s a hundred-fifty measly bucks between friends anyway? Don’t worry about it….
Then, one reads on, and finds that the grantee isn’t even making any grandiose claims about how many women it may have protected, how many cases it may have handled involving women who were victimized, etc. No, what it has been up to with its $1,314,685, has been stuff like
Conducted training sessions on court advocacy, legal issues, and policy issues for local domestic violence and sexual assault programs
Provided workshops, on-site training, and conferences for domestic violence advocates and allied professionals
Held speaking engagements, workshops, and other public activities on behalf of the Coalition
….whatever any of that means…. (my fave is, “other public activities”, which encites the imagination in a thousand directions?)
And then, beginning on page four, is a series of tables showing that, among other things, the grantee is claiming to have organized public events for which they say thousands of people have showed up. Only, (again, “oops, Our Bad…”) they sort of forgot to have any documentation to demonstrate that those thousands they say attended these things (“community education events”; again, the imagination runs wild, especially given that the org is headquartered in the same town where the infamous Duke Lacrosse Hoax took place…) actually attended them at all.
Recommendation: Ensure the Coalition maintains supporting documentation for all grant accomplishments.[p12]
Translation:
Feds: You say five thousand people came to these things but you can’t prove it? Golly. That doesn’t look so good. Hey, need to work on that, m’kay….?
Grantee: Hey, you got it. So, we can count on more money, then?
Feds: Not a problem…. Oh, and maybe try being a little more discreet about letting everybody use the outfit’s credit card, yeah….?
Grantee: Oh. Yeah. Um, we’ll look into that, honest.
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