Nothing new here, move along. If you're in congress and get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, you just resign, draw your retirement which is the same as your pay and live happily ever after not even to be bothered by those pesky voters. If you work for the transparent Obama administration you don't even have to resign. You just refuse to cooperate, lie, don't show up, still draw your pay and worst case get transferred to another cushy job and wait until retirement and live happily ever after.

This is the government we have let become a pack of thieves either right in front of our face or when we find out about what they have done in the back room (if we ever do find out). All they have to do is promise a bunch of freebies paid for by people that have worked all their lives and give it to the people that drop out of school in the eighth grand then whine because they can't make a living wage and go on strike if they don't get paid $30/000 a year for flipping burgers.

Does anyone know the direction to the Gulch?

Dr. Gruber is proof that some turds float. -- j

Apparently someone missed David Axelrod's recent interview. He stated how proud he was of this administration, that they had had no scandals in the six years of their term so far. His statement actually took my breath away, now I'm dependent on an inhaler.

Today I thanked myself for going and fighting when my country asked me to. A friend on Medicare is spending a small fortune out of his pocket for his inhalers. Mine only cost me a copay of $8 for 30 days supply thru the VA. He did not serve in the military. I'm feeling almost as entitled as our representatives in the government that have similar plans.

Since you wrote the magic name, "Gruber" it did take the suspense out why the things you describe happened. I don't want to denigrate the whole state, but you folks did elect Jesse Ventura as governor. Wait a minute...!! The rest of us did elect Barack Obama -- Twice! We certainly have no right to point fingers at Minnesota.

I can understand someone making a mistake and I respect those who step up and admit it. I don't like stuff like this. If you make money off the tax payer it should be understood that you may have to answer tough questions at some point. Just tell what happened.

I'll ignore the obvious, the criminals who are now refusing to cooperate, because others said enough. (What's their incentive to cooperate, anyway?)

What stuck out to me was, "approved $329,000 of invoices he submitted, all of which failed to provide the level of billing detail called for in his contract."

Former MN employee April T-M failed in her fiduciary duty by paying invoices that were incomplete. Both she and Gruber can be sued and Gruber can be ordered by the court to provide acceptable invoices or return the money. What he can't be sued for is being wrong, and I guarantee that his contract states that clearly even though it wouldn't matter if it didn't.

This kind of thing is rampant in state and federal government. Vendors get paid regardless of whether or not they've met their contractual obligations.

I'll have to sheepishly admit that I'm a state employee. One of the departments that my app development group supports is responsible for paying the telecommunications invoices for the entire state, well over $1,000,000 per month.

The manager of that department had us write code to see if we were being billed correctly. The answer was NO and he pursued them like a pit bull to recover the money going back about three years - millions of dollars in total. After the initial recovery he contracted with a company that specializes in that, and they work commission only so they have a huge incentive to find errors and recover incorrect payments.

The wireless vendors are also obligated to provide us, electronically, with detailed billing data so we could reconcile the invoices with our usage. They change the format and content of the data they sent so often that the two guys who maintained our software were flat out keeping up with data import issues.

Sometimes their changes would leave out info they were required to send and we took a hard line and stopped paying them until they complied. It was amusing to watch them drag their feet until their unpaid receivable was over a million, then suddenly they were in a rush to fix it.

Frontier took over the AT&T business a few months ago. It was a nightmare for almost everyone. They haven't even come close to meeting our data requirements and haven't received a single dollar yet.

It's refreshing to find a government agency that won't pay an invoice until the contract terms are met. If they all did that we'd still have a big, fat mess but at least it would be a slightly smaller one.

I can't really see the problem. Gruber's models produced projections with about the same accuracy that all of those global warming models have accomplished. The fact that your projections diverge radically from reality only becomes a problem if anyone is actually paying attention.
Darn it. I forgot to turn on my sarcasm font.

Disgusting.