Sudbury turning to police state
Two Sudbury Police officers arrested for fraud

Released on September 12, 2015 at 21:00 EDT
Tag #: 682
Bigger rides the merry-go-round...failing to keep his promises to taxpayers

Water department running on deficit
Incompetent Benkovich still on the job eating up tax dollars


Benkovich: Incompetent and controversial practices

The city's incompetent water and wastewater director, Benkovich, is still on the job and defrauding tax dollars continues as he has absolutely no respect for tax dollars. It was reported that as of March 2015, the water and wastewater division was over budget by $2.8 million.

Benkovich has played his usual card in front of taxpayers stating that the water main breaks were the result of extreme winter weather conditions and aging infrastructure. He further stated that this was also the reason for the impact on additional expenditures. Benkovich made a sweet deal with one of the contractors and a large amount of tax dollars were paid for the service. The contract was also renewed without any competitive bidding. Wikileaks Sudbury will not disclose identifiable information about the contractor in order to protect 3rd party economic interests.  

Benkovich allocated an annual budget of $1,096,348 for the contractor to do water main repairs. But as of March 31, 2015 Benkovich spent $1,847,800. The estimated budget was $407,983 which resulted in a deficit of $1,439,817.

 Benkovich did not utilize his own staff and internal city resources for water main repairs. The annual allocation for his own staff was only $162,897.  Salary and benefits budgeted as of March 31, 2015, amount to $53,593, however, a total of $62,192 was spent, which resulted in a deficit of $8,599.  

Table 1: Internal staff and contractor payout for water main repairs not proportionate

Upon analysis of these numbers, Benkovich allowed himself to run into deficit for his own staff by only 16.04%, in comparison with his generous willingness to enter into a deficit of 352.91% for the contractor. It has been established that utilizing the City's own resources including its own staff is the best option to reduce operational costs. Nevertheless, the incompetent Benkovich, was unable to arrive at any contentious solution with his own City employees and consequently, a large amount of tax dollars were scammed and defrauded.

Furthermore, there is "no proportional increase of deficit between the contractor and the internal staff allocation." This is a clear indication that a scam is still continuing and also highlights the presence of incompetence in managing a divisional business.

Benkovich continually justifies his scam stating that aging infrastructure resulted in the water main breaks.  If water main breaks are expected to increase than comparatively, Benkovich should increase internal resources and strengthen its allocation. Rather than finding a cost effective and efficient solution within the City, Benkovich continually hires a private contractor.

Benkovich has also attempted to justify his incompetence by blaming a decline in water usage as a result of less revenue. If there are definite facts that water usage is declining, the estimated forecast water usage should also be declining. Benkovich, however, chooses to work opposite to the scenario and, instead, estimated higher water usage every year in order to continue his scam.  This makes no sense, and the discrepancy is evident. As a result, taxpayers are no longer fooled by his incompetence.

Table 2: Declining water usage unaccounted for in budget forecast to hide incompetence and to defraud tax dollars

Upon analysis of these facts, the 2014 revenue obtained form user fees declined by 1.7%. This pattern also reflects previous years.  However when forecasting the 2015 budget, the incompetent, Bankovich, estimated 5.09% more revenue when compared to 2014. This higher revenue estimation does not reflect declining water usage. Benkovich should plan the water budget considering the declining water usage. Instead he forecasted a higher revenue in order to continue his scam. If there is a “higher revenue forecast ” he can continue to allocate a budget for external contractors to do the job at higher price.

The Bigger administration is failing to address those issues and Benkovich continues to utilize his old tactics and tax dollars scam. Additionally, Benkovich utilizes his authoritarian style of management to hide his incompetence in the division.

The Bigger administration must take stern action against Benkovich and surrounding corrupt bureaucrats in order to prevent further abuse and the defrauding of public funds. There are other options available but Benkovich must first and foremost, be kicked out from City hall to protect taxpayers.

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---------------------------------------------------- End

Editorial
Released on September 12, 2015 @ 21:00

This research initially published on Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 11 (93), Brief review and excerpts of the article follows.

Corruption drives the emergence of civil society

A centuries-old debate exists on how to best govern society and promote cooperation: is cooperation best maintained by a central authority or is it better handled by more decentralized forms of governance? The debate is still unresolved, and identifying mechanisms that promote cooperation remains one of the most difficult challenges facing society and policymakers today. Decentralized, individual sanctioning of non-cooperators (also known as free-riders or defectors) is one of the main tools used by societies to promote and maintain cooperation. Individuals can sanction free-riders implicitly via behavioural reciprocity (as in the case of the highly successful tit-for-tat strategy) or explicitly via costly punishment. Both of these forms of peer punishment have been widely studied using evolutionary models and behavioural experiments. Recently, however, researchers showed that centralized institutions can have an evolutionary advantage over peer punishment because, unlike peer-punishers, these institutions may eliminate ‘second-order’ free-riding. Second-order free-riders cooperate with other players but they do not pay the cost of punishing defectors and this can allow defectors to re-emerge. To address this problem, researchers  present a model of ‘pool’ punishment, where agents commit resources to a centralized authority that sanctions free riders. Pool punishment avoids the second-order free-rider problem because the centralized authority punishes any individual who does not contribute to the punishment pool (including cooperators and peer-punishers). This allows pool-punishers to quickly take over a population, displacing both free-riders and peer-punishers. These advantages help to explain why human societies frequently delegate punishment to centralized institutions. They also help to explain why centralized institutions acquire an increasing monopoly over legitimate punishment over time by stigmatizing and criminalizing various forms of peer punishment.

Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counter intuitively, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.

It is also possible that institutions may further evolve to deal with this remaining instability. Analytical results in the electronic supplementary information show that when second-order punishment is strong, hybrid punishers are only destabilized by neutral-drift towards pool-punishers (who then allow corruptors and defectors to emerge). Institutions may therefore want to screen and punish pure pool-punishers; and it is interesting that many justice systems have evolved rules that fine people who merely pay their taxes but do not register for various forms of hybrid punishment, for example jury duty. Importantly, however, we have shown that simply adding the risk of corruption can help to explain why centralized and decentralized forms of punishment frequently coexist. No additional appeal to civic norms or civic culture is needed. Which is not to say that these things do not exist or that they do not further promote citizen participation in policing the commons. Rather, our model shows that independent of other virtues, peer-punishment strategies can have a fitness advantage over pool punishment alone. In the face of corruption, peer and hybrid punishment strategies better promote cooperation because they are competitive. If one punisher fails to punish a corrupt individual, another might step in; and this result may help to explain why polities who want to control corruption and promote cooperation often become more tolerant to various forms of decentralized sanctioning.

Editor
WikiLeaks Sudbury
September  2015

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Corruption drives the emergence of civil society

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