Senator Tom Harkin, whose outspoken opposition to Wall Street generally and for-profit schools specifically has made him a leading voice in Congressional regulation of career and for-profit colleges. His office is set to release a report this month – the second in a series – detailing the horrific ramifications of applying free market principles to higher education, but it seems his office may have much to be concerned about given recent details that have emerged about the Senator’s direct involvement in not only the creation and distribution of faulty past reports, but in back-door dealings that should give any American pause.

Last fall, Harkin released a report that his office claimed detailed a host of transgressions on the part of for-profit or “career” colleges from misuse of student loan money to misleading counseling services and high default rates among graduates. The report was criticized by Senate Republicans as “unfair,” and Republicans boycotted subsequent hearings. It was later revealed that the report, compiled – with Harkin’s help – by the GAO, was faulty and many of its findings either fabricated or unusable and the GAO issued fix:

In November 2010, the GAO was forced to release a significantly changed report. The correction affected 16 of the 28 findings in the original report. The bias of the original report was also reflected in the fact that all 16 revisions were all of the same type: changing flawed statements that cast the for-profits in the worst possible light. Error after error took statements out of context or did not accurately portray what was said.

The report, however, had Harkin’s desired effect. Just days after the report was presented at a Senate hearing, the value of for-profit schools’ stock dropped 14% and companies that ran free-market educational facilities lost over $4 billion dollars.

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In case the fact that 76 percent of Americans oppose ditching the dollar bill in favor of a dollar coin wasn’t compelling enough, a new study that exposes the proposal’s supposed cost savings as mere myth should finally convince the super committee to abandon this clunker of a bill and focus on real spending cuts. According to the independent study performed by economic research firm John Dunham & Associates, the study finds that rather than saving money and helping the economy, a mandated switch from a dollar bill to a dollar coin would place a heavy economic burden on businesses of all sizes and types in the midst of an ongoing recession.

From Business Insider:

The group analyzed 29 different retail and service sectors in the U.S., finding that the annual cost of running business would balloon by $201 million and cause companies to shed at least 4,300 jobs.

The added costs come from adjustments such as adding new cash registers to hold the hefty coins, changing counting machines, purchasing larger safes and the costs incurred by banks, money transfer companies and financial firms, the study says.

“Changing to a coin would be a tax increase on retail and service firms of all sizes,” said John Dunham, president of John Dunham & Associates.

The debate is sure to continue on whether such a change and its potential to save the nation cash in the long-run is worth the initial hassle.

But it appears the public so far has spoken: More than 70 percent of consumers in a recent poll said they were against the proposal.

Supporters of the dollar coin, led by Arizona Rep. David Schweikert, cite a March 2011 GAO report as support for the contention that the switch would save money in the long run (over a 30-year period).  However, the study debunks that assumption as well, highlighting two key missing elements from the report:

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The St. Cloud Regional Airport is banking on a recently announced $750,000 federal grant to land an airline at the airport that’s been virtually deserted since Delta terminated service in and out of St. Cloud in late 2009. Despite a $5 million makeover of the terminal two years ago, St. Cloud’s airport has mostly sat idle as the city desperately seeks new commercial airline partners. St. Cloud received $750,000 in federal stimulus funding to assist with a portion of the renovation, but the project has thus far amounted to a passenger boarding bridge to nowhere.

The latest federal subsidy comes under the little-known Small Community Air Service Development Program (SCASDP), which provides temporary help to small airports to attract and maintain local air service through marketing and revenue guarantees. St. Cloud officials said the taxpayer gift would go a long way toward courting a new carrier, mostly by offsetting the financial risks involved with getting new service off the ground. In other words, the federal government is subsidizing the airport so the airport can subsidize the airlines. “One hundred percent of it will go towards what we call a minimum revenue guarantee. It’s really putting a pot of money somewhere set aside that in the event that airline loses money or has some start up costs or whatever it might be that they’re able to pull from that and make themselves whole,” airport director Bill Towle told the St. Cloud Times.

While increasing St. Cloud’s chances of attracting air service, analysis by the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota suggests the program fails to deliver for communities more often than not. In fact, a federal audit found that half of SCASDP grants failed to meet their objectives or failed to continue to provide air service capable of competing in the marketplace after the subsidies dried up.

Federal auditors have consistently raised questions about the overall lack of effectiveness of the $20 million per year FAA program. An Office of Inspector General 2008 audit revealed that just 30 percent of subsidy recipients were successful in achieving and sustaining their desired results for at least one year. The 40-page report concluded that “70 percent of the grants in our review failed to fully achieve their objectives. Specifically, 50 percent of the grants were unable to achieve any of their articulated grant objectives or were unable to sustain grant benefits beyond the grant horizon.”

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Two weeks ago, alternative energy company Solyndra, which received $535 million in “stimulus” loan guarantees from the Obama administration, collapsed. Solyndra was the poster child for the Obama administration’s claim that it could create green jobs with taxpayer money. Now 1,100 more people are out of work and American taxpayers are on the hook for half a billion dollars.

But while this ought to be an abject embarrassment for the dirigistes in the Obama administration, there’s a much bigger story behind the Solyndra scandal. It involves a concerted effort by White House officials to improperly rush the Solyndra loan decision for political reasons.

The Washington Post had the exclusive story:

The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.

The Silicon Valley company, a centerpiece in President Obama’s initiative to develop clean energy technologies, had been tentatively approved for the loan by the Energy Department but was awaiting a final financial review by the Office of Management and Budget.

The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.

The Post goes on to detail some of these email messages. Here’s one of them:

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”

Now here’s where mere incompetence turns into corruption. Want to guess the name of Solyndra’s biggest financial backer? Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser George Kaiser.

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This month the General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report on the financial crisis and came to the same conclusion as Judicial Watch: The government has failed to provide a rationale for its unprecedented intrusion into the private sector through the massive bailout scheme initiated in 2008. And more transparency is needed to get to the truth.

When questioned about their rationale for the bailouts (by Judicial Watch, the GAO and others), government officials simply repeat their standard line: There were “unusual and exigent circumstances” that warranted extreme measures.

Those extreme measures included the Federal Reserve authorizing credit to “troubled” private financial institutions. (Not since the Great Depression had the Fed authorized a loan to a non-banking entity.) If such measures were not taken, we were told, the institutions would collapse, thereby spreading a “contagion” throughout the global financial system.

This thin explanation is simply not good enough said the GAO. You can read the full report here. In my view, here are two key takeaways (as reported by CNBC):

1. In explaining the basis for these exceptional credit extensions, Federal Reserve Board officials cited the continuing strains in financial markets and concerns about the possible failures of these dealers at the time. However, the Federal Reserve Board could not provide documentation explaining why these extensions were provided specifically to affiliates of these four primary dealers.
2. …without more complete documentation, how assistance to these broker-dealer subsidiaries satisfied the statutory requirements for using this authority remains unclear. Moreover, without more complete public disclosure of the basis for these actions, these decisions may not be subject to an appropriate level of transparency and accountability.

On this subject of transparency, Judicial Watch has launched a comprehensive investigation of the government’s rationale for the bailouts on behalf of our client and former Federal Reserve employee Vern McKinley. We have a number of lawsuits related to the bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and others working their way through the system. And, in fact, on July 18, we filed a “Petition for Rehearing En Banc,” with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in our lawsuit over the Bear Stearns bailout (McKinley v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Case No. 10-5353).

Like the GAO, with this FOIA lawsuit Judicial Watch simply wants to know the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System’s justification for authorizing the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to provide “temporary emergency financing” to Bear Stearns through JP Morgan. (JW did learn from Treasury documents we unearthed that Bear Stearns was considered “worthless” at the time the Federal Reserve Bank of New York handed JP Morgan $30 billion to take over the company.)

The government is stonewalling our request, saying that information related to this question is protected under the “deliberative process privilege” of FOIA law (Exemption 5). As you might imagine, documents supposedly relating to the “deliberative process” can be most the most illuminating about government decision-making and whether it is on the up-and-up.

Unfortunately, an appellate court panel bought the government’s argument.

On June 3, 2011, the panel ruled that if a government agency simply makes the claim that information can be withheld under Exemption 5 the courts must assume that releasing the information will harm the agency’s decision making process – even if no proof of harm is put before the court.

Judicial Watch is now requesting that the appellate court hear the matter en banc (or in full, rather than merely a three-judge panel). Here’s a squib from our brief.

By substantially lowering the government’s burden of demonstrating that material may be withheld under the deliberative process privilege, the panel created a sweeping exemption that is in direct conflict with decades of decisions holding that material may be withheld under the deliberative process privilege only if a government agency demonstrates that disclosure of the withheld material would harm the agency’s decision-making process. [Emphasis added.]

Really this boils down to a very simple issue. We believe the American taxpayers deserve to know how and why the government committed trillions of dollars of their money to prop up failing financial institutions. But the government says it’s none of our business. (Just like the Obama administration says their debt ceiling “crisis” plans are none of our business either.) Unfortunately, if allowed to stand, the panel’s ruling could severely undermine FOIA law.

The government’s position on these bailout documents is offensive and corrupt. And we’re glad the GAO has called attention to that with its report.

Individual earmarks may have swum upstream for the winter, but there’s still something very fishy going on with Congress in terms of spending. Despite all the discussion about austerity and countless campaign promises to cut spending, the crafters of the Continuing Resolution let stand a rulemaking policy no one can be proud of: a special interest-driven program that will create over 100 new government employees, more red tape, and hundreds of millions of new federal spending, without any benefit to taxpayers…all for – you guessed it – a fish.

You may have thought that Ted Stevens’ giant salmon of a private plane was the most spectacular fish-related waste of taxpayer dollars in history, but you’d be wrong. It turns out that the government’s handling of real fish -specifically, catfish – dwarfs that million-dollar monstrosity.

A special interest provision tacked onto the 2008 Farm Bill mandated that the USDA inspect all imported catfish.  Proponents, who unsurprisingly included those with a stake in the American catfish industry, cited safety concerns as the reason behind the program, patriotically claiming that protecting Americans from bad foreign catfish was as important, if notmore important than protecting them from foreign terror groups.

Unfortunately, their argument for a sort of “catfish TSA” doesn’t hold water. As it turns out, all catfish are already inspected by the FDA, so this second inspection would be superfluous at best and at worst, a complete waste of taxpayer funds. Second, catfish are actually low on the threat-level scale, labeled a “low-risk” food by both the CDC and – get this – the USDA itself.

You read that right.

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From The Wall Street Journal:

A report from the nonpartisan GAO, to be released Tuesday, compiles a list of redundant and potentially ineffective federal programs, and it could serve as a template for lawmakers in both parties as they move to cut federal spending and consolidate programs to reduce the deficit. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who pushed for the report, estimated it identifies between $100 billion and $200 billion in duplicative spending. The GAO didn’t put a specific figure on the spending overlap.

The GAO examined numerous federal agencies, including the departments of defense, agriculture and housing and urban development, and pointed to instances where different arms of the government should be coordinating or consolidating efforts to save taxpayers’ money.

The agency found 82 federal programs to improve teacher quality; 80 to help disadvantaged people with transportation; 47 for job training and employment; and 56 to help people understand finances, according to a draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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Liberals will tell you they support freedom of choice, but they won’t tell you that freedom they are willing to extend you begins and ends with abortion. Try to exercise it in any other aspect of your life and they’re there, ready to pounce with some regulation or law forbidding you from moving forward with your liberty workout. It doesn’t matter to them what the impact is, they want what they want and they’re willing to step all over you to impose it.

The latest whipping boy in the crosshairs of these statists is the post-secondary for-profit education system. Odds are this battle won’t impact your life directly, but their attacks rarely do. They never attack the heart of that which they seek to control or destroy, they chip away at the edges until it no longer resembles that which it was. It still exists, but in such a way so as to no longer function effectively and eventually dies. Look at what they’ve done to off-shore drilling without so much as passing a law.

For-profit education is the choice for millions of Americans who, for any number of reasons, can’t or choose not to matriculate to traditional colleges and universities. The reasons vary – poor grades in high school, young children at home, etc. These schools serve mostly poor, underprivileged students who have very limited options. You’d think liberals would be for anything that helps the very people they claim to champion. But their rhetoric rarely matches their actions.

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Over the last several months, as attention has been focused elsewhere, the Obama Administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been waging a quiet war against for-profit schools and universities – educational institutions that offer  job training and degrees in in-demand fields to students looking for an alternative to four-year non-profit schools, or a more accessible price tag.

The Administration has fired a number of rounds at the industry, but recently unveiled it’s secret weapon: a “gainful employment” restriction on federal loan money available to students at for-profit schools. While for-profit schools have had their difficulties, their deficiencies aren’t that dissimilar to those of their not-for-profit counterparts, but this weapon could kill off for-profits as a viable option to not-for-profit education. Essentially, students at for-profit schools that have either a low graduation rate or an unacceptably high number of unemployed, graduated students would be denied federal student loan and grants. As Forbes points out, these schools serve primarily lower-income and minority communities who depend so heavily on student loans, such a restriction could put the whole industry in jeopardy.

Which, of course, is exactly what the Obama Administration would like to see happen. And, from recent news, it seems that they and their network of associates will do just about anything to make sure it happens.

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From Accounting Today:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said it could not render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.

“Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be done to improve federal financial management,” Acting Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said in a statement. “Shortcomings in three areas again prevented us from expressing an opinion on the accrual-based financial statements.”

The main obstacles to a GAO opinion were: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense that made its financial statements unauditable, (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.

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A bipartisan group of six Congressional lawmakers asked Wednesday the Government Accountability Office to reexamine its report on the for-profit education industry. The agency sent undercover applicants to some of these schools. The undercover investigators claim to have been misled on costs, job placement and future earnings.

In a letter to GAO comptroller Gene Dodaro, California Rep. Darrell Issa lectured the congressional watchdog on its charge to provide objective, factual and nonideological reports. In this instance, the incoming chairman of the House oversight committee said, “GAO has not met its own high standards.”

After releasing in August a sensational report on the alleged abuses within the career college community, GAO acknowledged earlier this month it had heavily revised portions of its findings, changing wrongfully attributed comments and lessening its charges of deception.

Issa wants to know if the GAO has investigated the failings in its initial report and if its office of general counsel had concluded the revised report accurately reflects the analysis contained therein.

A comparison of the modified and original versions revealed at least 13 key passages of the report had been altered.

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Senator Tom Coburn (R-O K) put out a report this morning titled “Federal Programs to Die for: American Tax Dollars Send Six Feet Under” showing rampant waste, fraud and abuse in government programs.  This report has put together programs totalling $1 billion in federal monies given to the dead.  For those to say that cutting waste, fraud and abuse is an empty slogan, this report shows that stopping checks to the dead is a means to save one billion of your tax dollars.

Delaware Republican candidate for Senate Christine O’Donnell was stopped from citing “waste, fraud and abuse” as a means to lower the estimated $13.6 trillion national debt during a debate aired on CNN.  According to a Daily News transcript published on October 14, 2010:

Arguably the toughest moment for O’Donnell came when she was asked to outline what programs she would cut to slash government spending and reduce the national deficit, two major themes of the Tea Party platform.  Before she responded, Blitzer told her she could not simply say cut waste, fraud and abuse because “everybody says that.”

This report shows that the elimination of waste, fraud and abuse is an important element of a comprehensive program to reduce the federal debt.  According to the Coburn Report, dead people received checks from the federal government in the form of Stimulus, aid to cool and heat homes, housing, prescription drugs, and medical supplies.  Dead people are receiving checks from Uncle Sam and you are paying for it.

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The document trail below reveals some extremely troubling questions for Representative Barney Frank. Is the GAO report cited below truly the first serious investigation of the mortgage meltdown? Did Congress or the Financial Services committee he chairs have access to mortgage meltdown information from other sources, especially with said GAO report already well on its way to completion?

Why was Barney Frank pushing for his “expanding home ownership bill” in the midst of this looming crisis he already has good reason to suspect was going to get worse? Was he pushing it for purely political purposes prior to the 2008 election, while knowing full well the American housing market was headed for disaster and American taxpayers would be left on the hook as a result of his policies?

While not quite a smoking gun, an examination of the record suggests that while Rep. Barney Frank had good reason to be concerned of a pending meltdown in the housing sector, either out of sheer incompetence, or political maneuvering, he did the exact opposite of what he should have done as a representative of the people of Massachusetts.

Via Mortgage News Daily, on April 24, 2007, problems within the mortgage industry were already coming to light. And it was happening right in front of Barney Frank’s committee.

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From CBS News:

With a $13 trillion debt, why is the Department of Justice spending money on parties and rollercoaster rides rather than investigating crime, drug cartels, prosecuting terrorists?

Untold millions of your tax dollars are paying for recreation in the name of crime prevention: pool parties, rollercoaster rides, and police donut-eating contests. The idea is that fun activities keep kids out of trouble, build self-esteem and prevent crime.

CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports the problem is the money comes from the Department of Justice – which doesn’t even have enough resources to keep up on analyzing foreign intelligence.

Now, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)has found nobody is measuring just how much is spent on the recreation – or whether it even works.

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Two role-playing investigators with bogus documents and a hidden camera walked into Head Start centers across the country to expose fraud and corruption. They got more than they had bargained for, discovering a pattern of rule-bending fraud so shocking it prompted a briefing for President Obama.

Is this the latest James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles sting operation?

Nope. It was the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which used tactics remarkably similar to O’Keefe and Giles, sans the pimp and prostitute costumes.

GAO’s undercover investigation revealed a common practice among Head Start employees: the deliberate disregard — or even outright falsification — of income documentation to pad enrollment. “Now you see it, now you don’t,” said a Head Start employee in New Jersey who “disappeared” $23,000 worth of income for one applicant so that his fictitious child could be enrolled. GAO found Head Start programs were more than willing to help its investigators falsify applications at eight of the 15 centers it visited.

The duo that destroyed ACORN last year caught flak from liberals for their undercover tactics. Media critic Eric Alterman of the Center for American Progress called their investigation “dishonest.” He wrote that O’Keefe and Giles “ignore[d] the rules of honest information gathering and reporting.”

In reality, O’Keefe and Giles’ investigative prowess turned the ACORN story into a national episode of corruption at a government-funded organization. Turns out GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, is using essentially the same tactics to expose malfeasance.

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Last Thursday President Obama, whose commitment to comprehensive immigration reform is “unwavering,” met with Sen. Chuck Schumer D-N.Y. and Sen. Lindsey Graham R- S.C. to discuss a proposed bill to fix the broken immigration system. While the details remain somewhat elusive, according to the Los Angles Times:

“The basis of a bill would include a path toward citizenship for the 10.8 million people living in the U.S. illegally. Citizenship would not be granted lightly, the White House said. Undocumented workers would need to register, pay taxes and pay a penalty for violating the law. Failure to comply might result in deportation.”

With the recent failures of the government agencies on full display during the failed Christmas Day bombing of flight 253, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that would be responsible for processing millions of illegal aliens should a path to citizenship become law, deserves national security scrutiny. Like the State Department, the USCIS is on the front lines of America’s defence. As we now know, Hillary Clinton’s State Department revoked known al-Qaida member Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab’s, visa after he allegedly attempted to blow up an airliner with explosives in his underwear. The credit for thwarting the Christmas Day terrorist attack goes to the passengers and the crew of flight 253—not to government agencies. Under the Department of Homeland Security, the USCIS’ mission includes keeping nefarious people off U.S. soil while preserving America’s tradition as a nation of immigrants by processing lawful foreigners’ applications for visas, residency and citizenship.

According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report,  Immigration Benefits: Actions Needed to Address Vulnerabilities in Process for Granting Permanent Residency,  “Terrorists and other individuals posing a threat to national security have applied for lawful permanent residency–” the Green Card. The “available data” provided to the GAO found that the “USCIS background checks identified individuals who were (1) KSTs [Known or suspected terrorist], (2) associates of terrorists, (3) involved in providing material support to terrorists or terrorist organizations, and (4) agents of a foreign government involved in espionage. From March 2003 through December 1, 2007, FDNS [Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] received about 14,500 national security referrals for all application types. According to FDNS officials, about 10 percent involved individuals on TSC’s [Terrorist Screening Center ] watch list and the balance of these cases involved individuals who were not on the terrorist watch list, but whose background checks indicated other possible national security concerns, such as those having associations with known or suspected terrorists.” The same applies for the Federal Bureau of Investigations. As the GAO report documents: “In addition to identifying potential national security concerns from checking an alien’s name against watch lists in TECS [Treasury Enforcement Communications System], name checks against the FBI’s investigative files have uncovered individuals who raised national security concerns. We reviewed a random sample created by FDNS of FBI name check results provided to USCIS to ascertain the types of national security concerns identified during the name check process. We found that the FBI provided information to USCIS that these individuals:

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Despite reports last fall that the Census Bureau had severed ties with community-organizing group known as ACORN, Americans might want to think twice before opening their doors to canvassers for the 2010 Census after reading what I discovered this morning.

According to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office Oct. 7, approximately 785 employees with disqualifying criminal records could still end up working for the Census Bureau this year. Excerpts (below) show the exact wording of the agency’s frightening information about the people who go door to door conducting interviews and collecting information for the 2010 Census:

The Bureau’s efforts to fingerprint employees, which was required as part of a criminal background check, did not proceed smoothly, in part because of training issues. As a result, over 35,000 temporary census workers — over a fifth of the address canvassing workforce — were hired despite the fact that their fingerprints could not be processed and they were not fully screened for employment eligibility.

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Sources on the Hill tell Big Government that the nomination of Ben Bernanke to remain Chairman of the Federal Reserve is in deep trouble.  A Senior Capitol Hill Staffer said to Big Government, “if [Senate Majority Leader] Reid does not file for cloture tonight, I don’t think they have the votes to confirm him.”  The Wall Street Journal thinks the vote will be “tight,” yet the White House is spinning that they have the votes.  Hill sources say that this nomination is trending in the wrong direction for the Obama Administration and many on the Hill are stunned by the news that, according to CNBC, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has announced her opposition to the nomination.  There is growing opposition to this nominee remaining in charge of the Federal Reserve for a second term.

Senators have made public statements indicating that there may be non-public information that is hurting this nominee.  Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) said that “the Fed continues to stonewall Congress and the public.”  Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) referenced “ongoing examinations by Congress and the GAO of the Fed’s AIG bailout” and that there are “unpleasant facts for the Fed and Chairman Bernanke” that will come out after “full public disclosure of all information about the AIG bailout” that has only been shared with “select Congressional Committees and the GAO.”  Senator David Vitter (R-LA) said, “it is vitally important that Congress has the ability and time to adequately review the Federal Reserve’s bailout of AIG.  Although some of our offices have had time to review some of the documents, not all are available at this time and Congress should wait until GAO’s review before proceeding with his nomination vote.” (more…)

From The Hill:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has informed two House Republicans that it will investigate ACORN’s use of federal funds.

The GAO sent a letter to Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, informing them of its decision. Smith and Issa on Thursday released the letter, dated Dec. 7

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The Sarbanes-Oxley Law was rushed through Congress in the wake of an enormous corporate accounting scandal that shook Wall Street and investors across the country. CEO’s and officers at several large companies were found to have “cooked the books”; i.e. knowingly falsified earnings statements to maintain stock prices or propel them higher. The practice came to be known as, Enron-Style Accounting.

The new law had many provisions, but one of its more sweeping was the requirement that corporate officers and executives assume personal responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of financial reports. In some cases, corporate officers could face civil or even criminal penalties if the numbers they reported to the public turned out to be inaccurate.

If only the law applied to politicians.

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