Friday, September 4, 2009

The Privilege is All Theirs

In the sixties they had a saying, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” When it comes to fighting corruption in the Garden State, the New Jersey Inspector General is boldly part of the problem. The Inspector General collaborated with the Attorney General to contrive an alibi to fire me. The real reason they had to fire me is because I am honest. In our corrupt state, that would be just one more ugly example of why the public is disgusted with the government. What makes this so hideous is the price for this hypocrisy has been foisted upon the most vulnerable citizens: innocent victims of violent crime.

As written in the previous blog entry, the Attorney General has illegally deprived thousands of innocent victims of over seven million dollars ($7,000,000) of services. While the Inspector General enjoys her big salary and benefits, rape victims go without counseling, shooting victims with no insurance are bankrupted by medical bills, parents of murdered children are dunned by funeral directors for burial costs they cannot pay, and victims of domestic violence are unnecessarily trapped in dangerous surroundings.

To digress, the VCCA processes thousands of claims each year. With a full-time staff of only 38 people, for the first eleven months of State fiscal year 2008, the VCCA received 3824 new claims. During that same time period, 2160 claims were deemed eligible for compensation and paid, 224 were deemed eligible with no compensable losses, 434 were deemed ineligible, 785 closed for administrative reasons. The people who work at the VCCA are diligent and professional in every way. Most of them have worked there for ten years or longer. They have both a tremendous amount of knowledge and a sincere desire to serve the people who come there for help. Most people in New Jersey have never heard of the VCCA because it is not an agency that advertises. It is well known to law enforcement agencies, medical professionals, and funeral directors – they are the people who most often refer people to the VCCA. I have found that once people understand what the VCCA does, they universally like it.

The VCCA costs taxpayers virtually nothing. During the years I headed the agency, we paid approximately $13,000,000 in benefits to victims per year, with administrative costs of approximately $2,500,000. Our revenue comes almost exclusively from criminal defendants. Each year we received approximately $7,000,000 from fees charged to guilty defendants in the various courts throughout the state, approximately $2,500,000 from fees charged to inmates at the commissaries in the prisons and jails, approximately $5,000,000 from a federal grant - money is derived from criminals in the federal system – and approximately $500,000 from restitution paid to the agency by criminals. Tax revenue does not even cover the cost of administering the office, and in return, every year thousands of citizens injured by violent crime get the help they need as a consequence of that crime.

In January 2008, I was informed by my supervisor in the Department of Treasury, David Ridolfino, the Inspector General was going to be investigating us. I looked upon this as an opportunity to display the good work we were doing and to seek constructive criticism. After an initial meeting with their investigators, I invited them to our weekly Supervisor meetings. The claims were processed by a team of investigators who report to a Supervisor. Each Supervisor had at least ten years of experience, so they were each well versed in the issues that arose and how we responded to them. As they were reviewing the claims, they set aside any one for which they were uncertain as to whether the victim’s claim should be paid. Each Tuesday, we met in the agency’s conference room where we went over the claims and the issues. A debate ensued at which everyone was free to voice their opinions about whether the claim should be paid. Sometimes the debates got spirited, and often there was a compromise reached before the decision was final. In every case there was serious consideration of the needs of the victim and our ability to meet those in keeping with the spirit and letter of the law. The Inspector General’s investigators and her lawyers sat in on these meetings for approximately six months. At no time did any of them approach me with any negative comments as to what we were doing.

It was clear to me in speaking to them that they had absolutely no background in this area and were ignorant of the agency and its governing statute and administrative code. If they had checked, they would have discovered the governing statute and administrative code are filled with qualifying language, giving the agency leniency to meet its goal – i.e. to assist innocent victims of violent crime who cooperate with law enforcement and have no money to pay for necessary services. This is the clear sentiment of the statute and administrative code and they have been so interpreted by the State Supreme Court.

In spite of the fact that the Inspector General had not completed her investigation, she responded to a request from the Attorney General for a letter that made it sound like she had found some reason for the Attorney General to fire me. She not only wrote the letter to the Attorney General, she published it on her website, where it is still on display. The letter, to which I have never been given an opportunity to respond, is meritless for several reasons. I was in charge of that agency for two and one half years. The letter refers to findings from a five year period. It never mentions me by name and never identifies any finding to have taken place during the time I was in charge. I had the opportunity to meet with the Inspector General and her staff in August, 2008. At that meeting, recorded on CD, it is painfully obvious the Inspector General was clueless. All allegations of wrongdoing in her letter are either referring to the time when the agency was under the supervision of my predecessor, or are the product of her ignorance as to the New Jersey State Constitution, statute, administrative code, and controlling legal precedents. Had the Attorney General been acting in good faith, she would have tried to determine if there was any validity to the allegations. Instead, she got the letter and made it her excuse to fire me in the press the following day.

Werner Attachment 9


It is helpful to digress and consider just what the Inspector General is supposed to be doing. The Office of the New Jersey Inspector General was created by Acting Governor Codey via Executive Order #7 on November 29, 2004. Its mission- as if written by George Orwell- is to “guard against extravagance, waste or fiscal mismanagement in the administration of any state appropriations”. Paragraph 10 of Acting Governor Codey’s Order compels the Inspector General to provide periodic reports to the Governor and issue a public annual report to the Governor and the Legislature.

Several weeks ago I made an Open Public Records Act request for any reports issued by the Inspector General regarding the investigation of the Victims of Crime Compensation Agency and the annual reports for state fiscal years 2008 and 2009. I received a response, attached below:

I G No Reports Letter

This response, or lack thereof, raises several questions. First, how can an agency that is supposed to be investigating mismanagement be so mismanaged that it fails to issue an annual report for fiscal years 2008 and 2009? The state fiscal year ends June 30th every year, that means the Inspector General has failed to report her activities to the public since June 30, 2007 – more than two years ago! Second, with all of the corruption in the New Jersey state government, how can the Inspector General justify spending so much of her resources investigating one agency like the VCCO? The Inspector General has had a team of lawyers and investigators culling though every file and interrogating every person who works at that agency for almost two years! Resources that could have been used to root out corruption were dedicated to conjuring an excuse to fire me, and she still cannot come up with one! Third, if the Inspector General’s investigation was so preliminary that she still had over one year to go, then why did the Attorney General use that letter to fire me without so much as getting my side of the story? And finally, if the Inspector General is aserting her privilege to deny a open public records act request for the results of a pending investigation, then why does she continue to publish the preliminary findings - many of which she now knows to be wrong - on her website?

The truth of the matter is this: The Inspector General has not produced an annual report in two years and has not produced any report about the investigation of the Crime Victims Compensation Agency because she cannot admit she has spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to do nothing more than drum up some phony excuse to fire me. The Inspector General has abused her authority to the extent that she cannot even produce an annual report. Apparently her agency has been so obsessed with the VCCA that she has done nothing in the interim to find any waste any place else in the government.

The Inspector General has done one thing for corruption: She has sacrificed her responsibility at the altar of public corruption. By collaborating with the Attorney General in this endeavor she has contributed to the pain and suffering of crime victims throughout New Jersey. A majority of these victims are women; victims of rape who cannot get therapy and victims of domestic violence who cannot escape their surroundings. They are women who do not have nice salaries and nice offices like the Attorney General and the Inspector General. She has also made it easy for the corrupt people within government to continue their crimes unabated by the agency that is supposed stop it. Inspector General Mary Jane Cooper is supposed to part of the solution to waste and fraud, but instead, she is a big part of the problem.

Edward Werner

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