Monitoring Federal Stimulus Funds

Mississippi is set to get billions of dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. MPB's Lawayne Childrey reports how the state intends to keep fraud to a minimum.

After Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast, Mississippi got nearly 24 billion dollars to rebuild. Now the state is poised to get about 2.8 billion to help stimulate the economy. State Auditor Stacey Pickering is helping draft legislation that would put audit teams is place to work out the checks and balances.

“They’re gonna be going into these state agencies to take a look at what their internal controls are. And also to take a look at what measure they have to detect and prevent fraud. So we’re gonna take a very proactive approach to this and not wait until it’s over or the money has been spent to start checking, we’re gonna start trying to check before the money actually arrives or makes it through the process.” .

The federal government is predicting about 7 to 10 percent of fraud to be generated from the stimulus dollars. Pickering says his goal is to make that less than 1%.

“We really have no excuse not to keep any fraud at an extremely low level because we had experience with this before. If we do what we’re suppose to do on the front end with checks and balances and the right internal controls we can prevent that from taking place.”

The proposed legislation has the support of Mississippi insurance commissioner, Mike Chaney.

“It’s important that we have someone with the expertise to be certain that the money’s spent correctly. I do not have that expertise within my department. We have actuaries, we have experts in rates but we don’t have experts in accounting that’s why I’m going to the state auditor to be certain that I’m spending the money correctly.”

Investigations will be conducted in much the same manner as they do in Katrina fraud cases. For MPB News, I'm Lawayne Childrey.