Muddying an audit
Surely for all her political savvy, Pennsylvania Treasurer Barbara Hafer could have been a bit more clever. Hafer, as head of the Pennsylvania teacher and state employee pension funds, had to come up with something to explain why she continues to stonewall Auditor General Bob Casey’s request to audit the performances of the funds. After all when Hafer held Casey’s job she asserted the auditor general’s statutory right to conduct special audits of the funds whenever she believed it necessary. It’s a right that she now claims Casey doesn’t have.
She ignored this flip-flop. Instead, in answer to a lawsuit Casey has filed in an attempt to force the audits, Hafer veers off point and makes the issue one of her opponent’s credibility.
Casey, she claims, has a major conflict of interest as he (are you ready for this?) accepted political campaign contributions from some pension fund investment managers. And can you believe this one, they aren’t the ones whose performance Casey planned to audit. Hafer who has also accepted money from these types would have you believe that Casey suffers a conflict, while she does not simply because she recognizes the potential conflict and recuses herself from board decisions involving her supporters.
Casey responded that the firms were selected randomly but he’d add those that Hafer signaled out. He just wants to get this audit accomplished.
It’s doubtful that this would satisfy Hafer anymore than Casey’s earlier concession that he wouldn’t bill the fund for the cost of the audit. Instead, she’ll most likely develop some other method to obscure the real issue.
Hafer isn’t budging from opening these records to the auditor general for inspection. Instead she has reverted to the classical, inept political ploy of mud slinging, in which the slinger is the one soiled.
Retired teacher and state employees, and those still toiling at their tasks planning on a comfortable retirement some day, need to demand that Hafer stop the politicking and start cooperating.