It’s a miracle that California is still functioning. The state has a $20 billion deficit — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants you and me to bail the state out — following decades of unchecked spending and taxing by liberal policymakers that has nearly bankrupted the state.
Now comes this LA Times story about an outrageous fiscal debacle in Los Angeles. What do you get when you combine unbelievable bureaucratic bungling with unconscionable lack of ethics? This:
Two former Los Angeles teachers face a court order to return salary overpayments of more than $148,000, part of an increasingly aggressive push by the Los Angeles Unified School District to retrieve $9.4 million from employees who were inadvertently caught up in its malfunctioning payroll system.
The judgments were approved this month in Los Angeles Superior Court against Adalberto Castro, who allegedly received an unanticipated windfall of $96,482, and Christina Garcia, who allegedly was overpaid $52,345.
The debacle began with the activation of Business Tools for Schools, a computerized payroll system, on Jan. 1, 2007. Over the next months, thousands of employees were overpaid, underpaid or not paid at all. Castro and Garcia, who were on unpaid status at the time, are accused of receiving some of the largest overpayments and returning nothing.
Just wait until we get nationalized health care.
