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$1.66mm seems like a lot for a traffic signal at an intersection. I’m sure an auditor could find a at least a few interesting items to dig in to and validate.


Good thing that the township retained an actual CPA, then. It'd be sketch as hell if a fucking sci-fi author slash real estate agent was in charge of an audit.


Yes we all know that auditing firms are never thoroughly corrupt/incompetent, nobody could have foreseen Enron or Lehman Brothers (or loads of smaller scale cases)...


Oh come on. Nobody said it never happens, but do you have any reason to suspect Maher Dussel is corrupt or incompetent? Do you have any reason to believe this random guy is as qualified as a team of CPAs to audit public sector books?


He's probably not more qualified, but independent oversight of public expenditures serves a valuable purpose. A hired accountant has no incentive to point out that it might be wasteful or unnecessary to spend Y money on a thing X as long as everything is done by the book.


Wirecard is one of the recent big ones.


With government, the FIRST place you look are benefits to employees.

In this case, they are paying $570,906 in 2022 in Pension benefits for 4 active employees. Now they certainly aren't paying $142,726.50 to each active employee so that means they have a string of retired workers that they're paying a good amount of money for.

An appropriate thing for an auditor to do is to then research how those employees earned their benefits. Did they "buy 15 years of tenure" for $3,200 thereby increasing their yearly benefit $40,000 per year? Did they "work" 120 hours per week of overtime in their last year to jack up their final year salary? These are real examples from a town near me.

None of these things are illegal and won't necessarily be flagged by a CPA who is being paid by the people giving or receiving these benefits. But they sure stand out to taxpayers who are footing the bill!

Think about it - all a CPA will do is check to make sure a supervisor signed off that someone worked 120 hours of overtime. They aren't going to investigate how that is even possible or likely.




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