New record set for one person embezzlement of public money in New Mexico.

The bar has been raised for anyone seeking to hold the record
in New Mexico, for embezzlement of public money by one
person. According to KRQE, link, the business manager for
the Jemez Mountain School has been looting the district
accounts, perhaps for as long as a decade. (She set the new record
in a single year; audits of previous years are apparently underway.)

NM State Auditor Hector Balderas was asked to investigate
the case, by the school's superintendent.

Balderas, in the KRQE report, said;

"I put the top auditor on this case; he's never seen
anything like this in his 25 year career."

Balderas said his investigator found that business manager
Kathy Borrego took $292,399 from two district bank accounts
in the last 11 months.

UPDATE: the final tally was over $3M, stolen over ten years.

So how did she get away with it for so long without being found out?

Balderas has stated on a number of occasions, that his office is
underfunded and understaffed. link


In an interview for Diogenes,
Balderas said;
when the stimulus money
finally gets to New Mexico,
he does not have resources
enough to protect it.

It is possible to make it impossibly difficult to hide corruption.

If all government spending was forensically audited every year,
Balderas estimates that it would save New Mexico taxpayers
between $120M and $240M every year.

If the Office of the State Auditor were adequately funded,
it would be impossibly difficult to hide embezzlements such
as these, and no one would try.



If the Bernalillo County Courthouse
project had ended with a forensic audit,
and everyone knew that it was going
to end with an audit,
Manny Aragon and his cronies
would not have even tried to steal tax
dollars, much less have nearly gotten away with it.



So why is the Auditor's Office, the watchdog over the spending
of 6 billion tax dollars every year, underfunded and understaffed?

Why is his office underfunded? except that those responsible for
establishing the funding for the Office of the State Auditor,
do not want it to be made impossibly difficult to embezzle
hundreds of thousands of dollars, without getting caught.

Are we going to listen to him? Are our representatives in
Santa Fe going to give him the resources that he needs
to protect our investment in our government, before
hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars are subject to plunder?

My Magic 8-ball wikilink, sez;

Don't count on it

photos Mark Bralley