November 11, 2015
As some readers may know, I have been monitoring the Justice Department’s audit reports on recipients of Violence Against Women Act federal grants, for over three years now.
I chose to place an emphasis on the fiscal activities of these organizations for many reasons.
My own objections, to a system of programs that nakedly discriminate against men by definition, are not enough, I reasoned, to substantiate why this Jane Crow approach to domestic violence (which is perpetrated by women as much as men, but the DC regime, the mainstream media and the general public all choose to ignore this), needs to be exposed for the racket that it is.
As a functioning complex of programs, the DOJ’s own records show VAWA’s grants complex as an atmosphere of reckless, continual, unchallenged disregard for even the most elementary principles of financial management and public-funds accountability.
Whatever one’s feelings may be about domestic violence or about ways and means to address it, my findings clearly show that even a cursory examination of DOJ’s own records will portray that
dealing with domestic violence and serving its victims, is the last thing any of these groups has in mind.
That would, it is obvious, get in their way of robbing the VAWA Gravy Train in broad daylight, for all it is worth,
and as often as not, then some.
And then, I found this today:
The latest report issued, as I have long predicted one would, shows a level of mismanagement and undisguised fraud with public funds that blows all the other negative reports I have read, right out of the water.
An agency in rural Montana has been found to have squandered and re-distributed nearly FOUR MILLION DOLLARS in public treasure, and in a manner so comically obvious that I can barely even read the report without my jaw dropping through the floor over the absolute incompetence, bloated sense of entitlement, and gleeful disregard for program legal guidelines it illustrates.
This most recent DOJ/OIG audit report is so packed with outrageous examples of open fraud, as to make it nearly impossible to isolate any one quote from its contents to illustrate my point.
One really has to see it, to believe it.
And this response on my part comes from having read dozens of these things, VERY few (almost none) of which show a scrupulous and lawful approach to spending these grant funds:
– There was a tribal organization that handed out all $1.2 million of its grants to its friends, drew out even more federal funds than were authorized on top of that, and then simply closed its doors for good, refusing even to speak to federal auditors on the matter at all.
– There was a territorial government found to be committing such a degree of seven-figures fraud, that multiple officials were prosecuted for these crimes, whereupon the agency in question was re-approved for even more grant funding and the matter forgotten.
– There was an outfit on the urban east coast that was paying for women to have a free lawyer in their divorce cases, so long as they were willing to allege that their husbands had been abusive to them, even though the grant terms did not allow for these attorneys’ services, nor did agency records show that their contracts had been created or administered lawfully.
– One agency after another has been found to be hiring “consultants” and “contractors”, with no process of vetting their qualifications, no written contracts governing their activities, no coherent records of how they spent the grant money handed to them in bulk.
– One organization after another has been found to be
double-paying staff,
writing rent checks to themselves,
creating employee positions out of thin air that no legal instrument has authorized,
shoring up shortfalls in other unrelated budgets with funds earmarked for specific purposes,
providing travel and lodging expenses for off-site events that were never authorized,
holding promotional events and spending large sums on party favors and logo items that were never approved,
and quite often, allowing unqualified staff access to interactive accounting systems for whatever purpose,
and on and on and on.
It doesn’t really matter, in the final analysis, that my original objection to this Act was based on my being made one of its endless parade of male victims, of fathers stripped of access to our children, of men accused without evidence and our legal rights ignored by all officials involved, our guilt presumed and the burden on the state to prove it discarded.
Yes, it matters that such a system of kangaroo-court justice is allowed to stand at all in a nation with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, but given the way politics works, the only thing that really resonates with anyone in the long run, is how the money is spent.
And on that topic, the record is more than clear.
I would think that it would be women’s organizations at the front of the line, calling for the harshest possible measures to be undertaken against those who would so openly defraud and discredit this flagship program of feminist policymaking.
I would think it would be a matter of front-and-center relevance to every Gender Studies program on every college campus, that this system which has been upheld as a model to the whole world as the way to address domestic violence, is in fact a sieve of corruption and a swamp of ineptitude, and openly so.
I would think that any self-respecting feminist pundit, blogger, social critic or mainstream commentator would be way ahead of me here, calling for an end to the egregious squandering and nepotistic re-distribution of wealth to cronies and influential parties, instead of using the money to help women, as it was intended.
This is where, all I can think of to say about the silence of feminism on the CATASTROPHIC FAILURE OF THE VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN ACT,
is,
(cue crickets.)
I would be embarrassed to claim the thing myself,
so I guess I can’t blame them…
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vawa-fraud-portrait-catastrophic-failure-ron-collins/