"If [Rick Perry] cannot even properly manage a $500 million fund, why in the world should American voters trust him with the management of this country’s finances?"

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COMMENT: Since when is someone called a 'manager' when giving out favors? Since when is someone called a 'manager' when giving out favors? Since when is someone called a 'manager' when giving out favors?
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Rick Perry’s management skills in serious question after auditor’s report
By Tod Robberson, September 25, 2014

Christy Hoppe’s blockbuster story about the first independent audit of the Texas Enterprise Fund contains quite a few shocking revelations, the biggest of which is how lax Gov. Rick Perry was in his financial oversight. The fund handed out $222 million to entities that hadn’t even bothered to submit applications. I wonder how that worked, exactly. If you have good contacts in the governor’s office, do you just call up and say, “Hey, could you funnel a few million my way?” And suddenly, poof, it’s yours.

For a governor who is making no secret of his presidential ambitions, his mismanagement of this fund is certain to play front and center in presidential debates as other candidates — Republican and Democrat — question whether he’s got the stuff to run our nation.

After reviewing the 98-page report, the governor’s office acknowledged that weak controls were in place when the fund first began in 2003, Hoppe reports. But now they’ve implemented the recommendations made by the auditors. I wonder, if the audit hadn’t happened, would these shoddy practices still be happening?

The “process and policies of the TEF have evolved” and it has now adopted “a more standard operating procedure,” Perry aides told the auditor.

Let’s read between the lines here: Left to their own devices, the people directly under Perry’s supervision never thought to question the way the Enterprise Fund money was being dispensed, even as they doled out nearly half of the total amount of the $500 million fund to people who apparently hadn’t even submitted a formal application for it. Nor were those requests accompanied even with a promise to create jobs in exchange for receiving the money.

For Perry and his staffers, that process was working just fine until those pesky auditors barged in and messed everything up. The auditors complained, “it was not always possible to determine whether award decisions were supported, or to determine the number of jobs that recipients of the awards from the Texas Enterprise Fund created.”

This is a guy who has built his presidential ambitions on attacking the Obama administration for its economic management. If he cannot even properly manage a $500 million fund, why in the world should American voters trust him with the management of this country’s finances?
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