Republican congressional candidate Mike Cargile plans to demand interagency communication and will organize an audit committee if elected.
“The government is so big that it creates little mini-governments inside the government, and they do not talk to one another because they're their own little universe,” he said.
Cargile made the comments in response to an Open the Books oversight report called "Where’s the Pork" which discovered that some 2.2 million dead people were paid $3.6 billion in economic stimulus checks because the IRS purportedly didn't review the deceased person list at Social Security before issuing the checks.
“The IRS, whose chief job it is to audit and get people's money when they file their tax returns, is so big itself that it can't even audit the inner workings of sending out checks and then we add 87,000 new IRS agents, which will add yet another layer of bureaucracy,” Cargile told the Southern California Record.
The watchdog report further found that 57,000 entities received Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) forgivable loans because the SBA didn't check the Treasury's Do Not Pay list.
“While the national debt keeps continues to soar, Washington continues to spend on things like a virtual reality learning experience about penguins, or an experiment involving transgender monkeys,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO, and founder of Open the Books. “What’s worse is the money wasted through fraud, misdirection, unnecessary spending, and simple poor management. To read the report is to browse through our government’s worst habits.”
As previously reported in the Southern California Record, Cargile, a filmmaker, was the top Republican vote-getter for District 35, east of Los Angeles, in the June 7 primary, defeating GOP fellows Rafael Carcamo and Bob Erbst. He now faces incumbent Democrat Norma Torres in November’s mid-term election.
“There needs to be more interagency communication before payments of this size and magnitude ever occur again and I would put together a committee to audit where the failures occurred,” Cargile added. “I would also mount a concerted effort to find out who cashed the checks and return the money to the American taxpayer.”