Add to this effective internment of the incomplete audits (which DCAA would have completed over the next six months as they began the new cycle on 1 October) the fact that there is no provision to begin the next cycle of audits. Whether the FWS or the Department of the Interior or OIG or some new contract entity were to receive that task, they will need to reinvent the wheel. What to audit, how to get answers, who to work with, seminars, question sessions with bureaucrats and politicians, etc. along with an organization and file system will all have to be established once the mandate is given. In the meantime the old audit information will age and disappear. The states will once again go more than five years without a thorough audit. Because they will be unsure of how the next audit will be conducted, the states can be expected to exert political pressure to make the next round of audits more friendly to those audited. This is hardly the prescription for an efficient oversight of the annual disposition of millions of Federal excise tax dollars.

While the states and FWS have been very quiet about these developments, why haven’t the Washington non-government conservation organizations (NGO’s) been pressing for publicity of this matter? Why haven’t demands to assure that audits are made and the results rectified been made? Why aren’t there demands to know why a Federal agency can fire auditors before their job is complete with no provision to complete their audits or continue the mandated audit cycle? The NGO’s, like the Federal bureaucrats and the state agencies are strangely silent.

Last but not least, what about the Congressional Committees and staff members who are supposed to oversee the FWS? Are they aware of all this? Shouldn’t they be? Why is the silence deafening there also?

An FWS former employee who worked with the DCAA auditors and who was forced to retire adds yet another wrinkle to this story. He claims that FWS mandated investment of funds before they go to the states has been increasingly failing to be done in a timely manner. This has resulted in lost interest of as much as $35 million. In addition to this loss of investment interest on the excise taxes, FWS has let appropriated money from Congress languish for months recently when they were supposed to invest it. That resulted in a loss of over $800 thousand plus the equal amount of match money that it would have generated when used to purchase wetlands. No one in FWS, Congress, or the NGO’s was concerned about that too, why?

The reason for these delays and lost interest is FWS attempting to show Congress that the restrictions implemented in 1999 to minimize FWS access to P-R and D-J funds are too restrictive. They want to establish a record that more personnel and money is needed to invest all the money. The approximate current amount of FWS investments are in the neighborhood of $2.1 BILLION.