All right. I’m going to finally do it. I’m going to give back the Government money they have never asked me for.
How it Happened
When the government gives out money for a grant, they only give it to a registered charity. But the registered organization may not be delivering the service. They may be acting for a contractor or a group of unregistered volunteers.
It’s a good system. The charity keeps the books and monitors the spending, and the workers out in the community do what they are good at. I have worked for twenty years in this capacity, providing various services to seniors. Sometimes I had a contract, but in the gaps, I worked for free.
However, when the term for a government grant is over and everything is put away and the books closed, there is often a residue of equipment and resources left, sometimes in somebody’s basement. Probably only one employee of the charity knows about it, and charities have a habit of moving their employees around. The new supervisor looks at the old project, sees that the books balanced and the government approved the report, and archives it all.
Leaving Gordon with $3,000 worth of lighting and sound equipment, lightly used and well taken care of. It was a piece of cake to post in on Facebook Marketplace and sell it for 50% of the original price.
Leaving Gordon with $1,500 of unaccounted-for money in his savings account.
And then COVID hit, and the original volunteer organization folded and never returned. People get old and move on.
I always intended to return the money to the charity, but a sneaky little voice in my mind suggested I hold onto it for an experiment. How long would it be before anybody noticed?
It seems the answer is “forever.”
Enter moral quandary. What to do with it? I could blow it on a wild weekend in the Empress Hotel in Victoria, complete with English Tea with scones and clotted cream. I could leave it in my account until I die, and it would vanish into my estate. Fortunately for me, I value my sense of self-worth and my peace of mind much higher than $1,500. I’m giving it back.
The Point Is…
It just goes to show how easily government money disappears. The system is set up very carefully to make sure the receivers of grants (and contracts, even for billions of dollars) are legitimate. But there are cracks. In our case, we were working with a big, city-wide charity. We had a talented group of people with decades of experience and a good spread of job competencies. In other words, we had a high success rate, and always made our supervisor look good. So, if we applied for a grant, we usually got it. Because I was the technical expert, I pretty much dictated what was needed for equipment. Which worked fine. As long as I was honest.
And that’s where the rest of the web started to tangle. I’m sure the government has the right to audit anything that looks suspicious, but in general, they are far less rigorous in keeping track of how the money is spent. And once the project is finished, everybody just wants to get it off their hands so they can do the parts of their jobs that produce results. Contractors are in the business to make money, and government jobs are considered low-hanging fruit. When competition and dishonesty start chumming around together, our tax money is the first victim.
Another Little Example
In my university days, I spent several summers running a chainsaw for a Forest Service crew. When we were packing up one September, there was a partial box of saw files left over. The boss told me to keep them. Why? Because we didn’t need the same number of files every summer. Some years we worked in flood plains where the tree bark was full of sand, and we filed several times every day. If we used fewer files this summer, our budget would go down for next summer, and we might run short. So, I ended the season with a box of saw files I didn’t particularly need and a tarp with a ripped corner (which I still have, 50 years later. The government can come and get it if they like).
Because that’s the way the system works.