1/3 of Billion Dollars of Taxpayer Money Wasted - Thanks Dem

Gov. John Hickenlooper is ordering better oversight of Colorado unemployment payments after the Department of Labor says it overpaid unemployment benefits totaling more than $300 million over the past three years.
Hickenlooper also ordered the department to try to recover benefits paid to ineligible recipients.

Unemployment insurance division director Jeff Fitzgerald tells the Pueblo Chieftain that most of the overpayments were common mistakes and not fraud.

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/29 ... etail.html

RT: That's a heck of a mistake.... $ 300 million.... .that's 1/3 of billion dollars. But it's o.k. Obama sent the money anyway.

How BUSH sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish
Special flights brought in tonnes of banknotes which disappeared into the war zone

The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.

The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.

In the year after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on June 22 2004, six days before the handover.

Details of the shipments have emerged in a memorandum prepared for the meeting of the House committee on oversight and government reform which is examining Iraqi reconstruction. Its chairman, Henry Waxman, a fierce critic of the war, said the way the cash had been handled was mind-boggling. "The numbers are so large that it doesn't seem possible that they're true. Who in their right mind would send 363 tonnes of cash into a war zone?"

The memorandum details the casual manner in which the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbursed the money, which came from Iraqi oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food programme and seized Iraqi assets.

"One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills," the memorandum says. "One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

I'll see your 1/3 of a Billion and raise you 11-2/3 Billion... Thanks Bush.

Gee, I think Looney Jerk forget that OBama has 9 Billion in loses in the war against the sun. LOL

There is more to the original story than the 300 mil. I guess Colorado's error rate is around 18% on unemployment claims. The "goal" is 10% Haha can you imagine a private company saying we have a goal of 90% quality and that is good enough. 10% waste/error is not too bad. LOL Big government at its best.

And the conservatives think the US will be better off economically if we transfer power from the federal gov't to the states
Yeah, right.

Well in this case Archer, the Feds are funneling the money thru the states for extended UI, and the 10% number is a Federal guideline. The states probably don't care much since the money is just passing thru and they have to administer it at their own cost, sort of like Medicaid.

Joe...is the state administrating the program? Or are the feds? Who is responsible for the losses?

http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_19100939

Well it is the state administering it, some of the money comes from the Feds for the extensions and loans to the broke trust fund.

"The $305 million is out of $2.3 billion paid in benefits, she said.

Under federal guidelines, improper payments should not exceed 10 percent of total unemployment payments. The U.S. Department of Labor notified the state in late August that its improper payments reached 17 percent to 18 percent, Golombek said."

It is stimulus spending, we don't care where it goes....

Are liberals justifying government waste?