If you work for the Department of Justice, you get a muffin. Probably, a darn tasty one, too. By now, most have heard about the DOJ’s less than frugal use of public monies to plan and fund law enforcement conferences. Whether you laugh at the absurdity or cry at the waste, it’s destined to be remembered like the $400 hammers or $600 toilets as exemplars of poor governmental handling of our money.
If you spend time representing defendants in corporate or financial criminal investigations and prosecutions, however, these muffins take on a different flavor. At the core of these cases, AUSAs who have never run corporations, built skyscrapers, manufactured consumer durables or distributed a product worldwide are busy substituting their judgment of good and bad choices for those of corporate executives who have accomplished these things.
To put it more bluntly, people are being prosecuted and convicted for not buying $16 muffins.
The issue was at its most apparent in “honest services fraud” cases, where the distinction between honest and dishonest rested with the sensibilities of lawyers in the government’s employ. The argument was framed as “what choice would be made if you viewed the world through the lens of a young government attorney.”
Not surprisingly, there was often a difference in opinion as to how an AUSA would handle dealing with the burgermeister of a small Swiss village, or a union business agent in a depressed southern town, and how the person whose job it was to get the job done would do so. The latter was charged with being effective and efficient, getting a task accomplished as quickly and inexpensively as possible. The former was charged with following an official checklist, even if it meant buying $16 muffins.
The message of $16 muffins isn’t just that the government doesn’t do a very good job of using its resources with some reasonable degree of thrift. The message is that the very people who believe that they are uniquely capable of telling others, people who are employed for the purpose of achieving goals and accomplishing tasks, how they must do so upon pain of prosecution and conviction, aren’t very good at it. In fact, they suck at it, as demonstrated by the $16 muffin. Or the laundry list of other financial misuse, as determined by the DOJ Inspector General.
One has to wonder, had they been in the employ of a major American multinational corporation rather than the government, would they merely be admonished by the IG that they’ve frittered away millions of dollars, or would they have been the targets of an investigation resulting in the demand that their Board of Directors be subject to the oversight and scrutiny of DOJ regulators? So they could serve $16 muffins to the directors?
And yet these young attorneys, who investigate and filter through their own limited experiences the propriety of how others make decisions about how corporations should function, maintain their belief that they not only know better than anyone else how business should function, but that anyone whose conduct doesn’t satisfy their sensibilities deserves to go to prison because of it.
Don’t expect to see an indictment any time soon over some senior vice president authorizing the provision of $16 muffins. That would make for an embarrassing opening statement. But if it happens to be a $6000 shower curtain, well, that’s another story entirely. That’s clearly an indicia of a crime, right?
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I don’t know that this is the case with these costly muffins, but those outrageously-expensive hammers and toilet seats might be attributed more to government accounting methodology rather than its profligacy.
One of those accounting practices is that overhead costs attributable to a purchase are divided evenly amongst the items procured. If a procurement involves building equipment, this might mean that a bulldozer and a hammer bought in the same contract have the same overhead costs. Any rational person would understand that considerably more overhead, profit, etc. in that contract is associated with the large, expensive durable good rather than the off-the-shelf hand tool. Sadly, rationality is not necessarily a job requirement in government accounting.
This doesn’t mean that government is, upon closer examination, much more efficient and frugal than might first appear; it merely means that some of the more egregious examples of wasteful spending might not be quite as egregious as some of the accounting tricks make them seem. Yes, government wastes and overspends (bureaucracy has a considerable cost) but all may not be as it first seems.
That accounting peculiarities make some things appear worse than they actually are is worth noting because many of those same bean-counting gimmicks work the other way, masking truly outrageous spending. One need look no further than the recent debates over the costs of various tax changes, jobs programs, and the like to see that wildly different numbers — all of them inaccurate, of course — are supportable using various accounting tricks.
So, did the feds actually pay $16 per muffin for their little get-together? These may be $1 or $2 muffins whose costs are inflated because of accounting oddities. Their costs may also be inflated because for every $2 which was spent on a muffin, $14 was spent on something they’d rather you not know about. Perhaps they really did spend that much per muffin because the contract was ordered to be sourced to a small, disadvantaged, minority-owned bakery with the provision that that bakery source its ingredients at higher cost from a preferred vendor and hire employees specially for the project (three times as many as needed) from a government jobs program which a particular politician takes a keen interest in. Anything which messes with the free market costs; did it cost the better part of $16 per muffin? Who can say?
Ultimately, that’s the real problem. Government isn’t as transparent as it should be. They don’t want to say how much they’re spending. If they tell you, you can’t trust the numbers because government’s so screwed-up that even they don’t understand why or how much they’re spending. You’re correct that to hold themselves to no standard at all while holding private individuals and organizations to a very stringent standard, with fines and prison time for transgressions, is supremely hypocritical. Didn’t something similar prompt a revolution once upo
Cool story, bro.
Oh, I see I misread. When I saw that 3,000 characters notice in the comments form, I thought that was a minimum, not a limit. Tomorrow, instead of a lengthy comment, I’ll just put in “tl;dw” — “too long, didn’t write”. Just assume that it would’ve been the greatest Simple Justice comment ever, OK?
It’s amazing how many people make that same mistake. In any event, since you already hold the record for greatest SJ comment ever, it will be no stretch at all to assume your TL;dw comment to be even better. Party on, Garth.