DC Tax Office Thefts, Bigger and Older!

The latest shocking developments on a massive embezzlement scheme at the DC Office of Tax and Revenue suggests the CFO's response is way too late and too short sighted.

The thefts grew overnight from $16 million to $20 million as federal officials produced more than a dozen additional phony tax refund checks, some of them dating back to 2001, that they said were stolen out of government coffers and into the hands of two D.C. tax employees and their co-conspirators.

This means money was leaving the T and R Office well before Sherryl Hobbs Newman took charge in 2005. The thefts had to have begun when Mayor Tony Williams, a former Chief Financial Officer was still in office and when his own hand picked successor and current CFO Doctor Natwar Ghandi was in place.

These latest findings by federal prosecutors might suggest there is nothing the current administration can do to withstore credibility to the office which puts billions of dollars into the City's coffers annually.

We may have to wait until after the federal probe and DC Council Public hearings are concluded before we really know the extent of this scandal. And what must the new Mayor really make of all this? The thefts apparently continued in the first ten months of the Adrian Fenty administration and let's not forget Fenty moved quickly to re-appoint Gandhi immediately after taking office.

Under the CFO why has there been no internal audit of this office for nearly seven years? Now the new interim director of Tax and Revenue is the guy who should have been conducting an audit. How does this bring credibility back?

There are some early scapegoats as people have been forced to resign; but no clean hands in this one!

A series of raids Wednesday and newly found bank records revealed that manager Harriet Walters, her co-worker Diane Gustus and Walter's relatives and friends had fabricated 58 property tax refund checks, not 42, as originally announced Wednesday;

Also, it turns out that Walters and Gustus reaped lots of expensive gifts on their co-workers to at least get them to look the other way and not ask questions while the massive thefts were taking place. If this is true why have other tax and revenue employees not been fired, disciplined or at least re-assigned?