How does a baby grand piano go missing? Er, maybe someone stuck it in the closet. … No? The janitor must have thrown it out with the trash…
How do you misplace a $10,000 incinerator or three baby grand pianos, asks Kathryn Wilson with Virginia Watchdog. Virginia State University managed to do so, along with sculptures, laptops, lawnmowers, copiers and a tractor. A request under the Freedom of Information Act identified $8 million in taxpayer-funded fixed assets that had gone lost, missing or stolen across the commonwealth. And that’s probably incomplete, writes Wilson, because the state has no complete database of its assets, much less a database of missing assets.
“Once again, it seems that as long as the bureaucrats are dealing with other peoples’ money, it gets virtually no attention,” Tim Wise, president of the Arlington County Taxpayers Association, told Watchdog.org.
— JAB
