Rooting out public corruption and incompetence, or not.

The Journal reports on the public corruption and incompetence in River City's maintenance yard, link. Mayor Richard Berry's response is to "... instruct all department heads to review their purchasing procedures ..."

Yeah, that should work; have them review their own procedures to see if they can find any evidence of their own corruption or incompetence that they would like to expose.

In other words, same old, same old.

State Auditor Hector Balderas has said that, on the state level, if he was given one percent of the budget to hire the staff he needs, he could audit corruption and incompetence nearly out of existence; a net savings to taxpayers of 2-4% of the overall budget. The legislature won't give him what he needs because they really don't want actually put an end to the lack of honest accountability for public corruption and incompetence.

If there is some other good and ethical reason for the legislature to perpetually underfund oversight, someone please share it.

City government has no interest in proactive forensic auditing either, though there is no reason to believe that the city would not enjoy savings similar to those Balderas promises for the state.

If Mayor Richard Berry really wanted to put an end to public corruption and incompetence in city government, he would make them impossibly difficult to hide; he would order proactive forensic audits of every department as a matter of course.

The Albuquerque Public Schools follow suit. The leadership of the APS steadfastly refuses to allow an independent review of their executive and administrative standards of conduct and competence. They too, have a different priority than actually ending any public corruption and incompetence in the administration or on the school board. If they did, they would begin independent reviews rather than relying on administrators and board members to simply confess their incompetence and/or corruption.

Spend 1% of the budget on aggressive forensic auditing of the spending of tax dollars; save 2-4%.

Seems like a no brainer.

So what am I missing?