OK, this is it. I’m finally going to call up Mayor Anthony Williams and thank him for making my job as a District affairs news columnist so damn easy. Just when I think the District’s government has hit rock bottom, it takes that extra step to prove me wrong.
Over the past few months we’ve witnessed District employees embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars from the D.C. Teachers Union, Anthony Williams get caught on the beaches of Puerto Rico as a snowstorm ripped through the city and now this-the District government has failed to distribute nearly $3 million to child support recipients across the city.
I’ve always considered deadbeat dads to be among the slimiest people on the planet. A guy has a kid, leaves him and then decides not to pay child support. That’s low. But in the District, it’s the government, not these slimeballs, that keeps money away from single parents and their children.
This little discrepancy was discovered by the city’s Inspector General’s office this week after it completed an audit of the Child Support Enforcement Division’s financial statements. They also found that the child support system might soon lose $1.4 million in federal funding because it has failed to comply with changes to the national welfare system seven years ago.
With all these allegations against them, you’d expect people at the Child Support Enforcement Division to have at least come up with some pretty good explanations.
Not quite. In an interview with the Washington Post, Arabella W. Teal, who oversees the child support agency, said, “This is not a surprise to us. ” She blamed the undistributed $3 million on “computer problems. “
So let me get this straight. The department knew that computer problems were causing families across the city to not receive the funds they rely on to feed their children and no one did anything about it. A broken system cannot get much more broken than this.
As much as this hurts me to say, the District has a money problem. I guess we shouldn’t be that surprised; it hasn’t even been a decade since the most corrupt mayors in the District’s history, Marion Barry, reigned supreme.
But Anthony Williams was elected upon the hope that he could eliminate the city’s financial woes. After inheriting a budget deficit upwards of $700 million as the city’s Chief Financial Officer, Williams put the city back in the black. Too bad his administration hasn’t been able to shake the corruption and incompetence of the preceding one.
As his deadbeat government replaces deadbeat dads as the city’s lowest scum, let’s just hope Williams can work his financial magic for the city one last time.
