From the WSJ:
California Dreamin’ of a Government That Actually Works
Sacramento swings big but neglects the basics, like producing timely audited financial statements.
By Marc Joffe, Dec. 22, 2023
… Launched in 2005, the Financial Information System for California, or FI$Cal, was intended to streamline the state’s financial processes. But 18 years and $1 billion later, FI$Cal has yet to be fully implemented, forcing accounting staff to consolidate data across multiple systems.
Also complicating recent attempts to produce a state audit was the pandemic-era meltdown of California’s unemployment system. Although many states had problems keeping up with the rush of unemployment claims in Spring 2020, California’s crisis was far worse, combining long delays for legitimate claimants with tens of billions in benefits collected by scammers. Unlike most other states, California had no procedure for matching claimants against a list of prison inmates.
California’s Employment Development Department wasn’t able to produce a reasonable estimate of the amount of unemployment fraud committed during the pandemic. As a result, the state auditor concluded that the California’s unemployment fund may have “material misstatements in receivables, liabilities, and expenses,” and gave California’s 2021 financial statements a negative audit opinion.
In hope of improving the timeliness and quality of California’s audited financial statements, the auditor’s office has moved staff away from the task of monitoring local-government finances. Until October, the auditor’s office was maintaining a local-government high-risk “dashboard” showing which California cities were in financial distress. But it canceled its dashboard project …
… Meanwhile, California’s local governments are taking on their own big, hairy, audacious goals and not attending to core services. San Francisco is studying reparations for slavery and implementing public banking, while failing to provide public safety and clean streets. Cities around the state are adding sustainability managers to reduce municipal carbon footprints, even though any individual city in California contributes a small fraction of 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Golden State is blessed with mild weather and natural beauty. Earlier generations created an ecosystem of higher education and venture capital that has generated enormous wealth. But these benefits don’t guarantee a high quality of life in perpetuity. If state and local government waste taxpayer money on ambitious projects and fail to execute basic functions, residents will continue to exit. …
Mr. Joffe is a federalism and state policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
Meanwhile, there’s also the Californian waterworks debacle:
Victor Davis Hanson, Historian, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
My thanks to the Wall Street Journal … and Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller