Inquiry Costs 23.8 Times More Than Expenses Being Investigated

In a scenario so absurd it would require the government to do it, an investigation into $991,917 cost the auditor general $23.6 million to conduct! LOL, that’s 23.8 times the actual expenses being investigated.

 

Maybe we need an investigation into the inquiry and why it cost $24 million.

 

Also, according to the auditor general, they spend about 1000 hours PER senator on investigations. This sounds ridiculous to me! 1000 hours is more than the average number of work hours in a year. So basically there is more time spent investigating a senator than the actual amount of time he or she works in a year. How is this even possible??? Essentially you could have someone shadow each senator for every working hour analyzing everything the senator is doing to make sure it’s valid. Does this sound reasonable to anyone, even the most ardent statist?

 

Imagine an accounting company operating like this. Companies have expenses, and unlike the government it really matters if they are wasteful. Someone pays for that – someone could be fired. So imagine a company consults an accounting firm and asks how much it would cost to be audited. The company has 10 employees, and the accounting firm says it will cost $700,000 per year to audit the 10 employees. Obviously the owner will reject this offer.

 

But for argument’s sake, let’s say he accepts the offer. The company does its audit and finds $29,412 being improperly spent. So the owner looks at this and realizes he spent $700,000 to find out they misspent less than $30,000. Let’s just say they wouldn’t hire this organization in the future.

 

But we’re dealing with government here, not business. We all just pay taxes and except for a general sense of dissatisfaction, very few people do much about it. So we get hundreds of government departments spending money left, right and center. Then every so often, the auditor general comes out and tells us some money was misspent and we’re reassured they’re doing something about it. But this is all just meant to placate us. Nothing ever changes. Billions are spent as headlines are made about a couple thousand misspent. It’s all just meant to keep us from doing much.