A whistleblower requested a stop on a New Jersey bus company’s practice of underreporting trips and overbilling the state for hours and miles driven. The New Jersey Acting Attorney General’s office announced it had settled a case against Academy Bus, LLC for $25 million.
affected by the storm. that was the justification for this being a sandy project. that s whatnot having the kind of website christie vetoed means when it comes to tracking sandy money. moving back to the law. the law that did pass, the integrity monitoring law that went into effect nearly a year ago at the end of last march. integrity monitors were selected and many have been in place and seemingly ready to go since last summer. the law requires on the first business day of each quarter, every one of those integrity monitors is supposed to provide a report to the state treasury that includes, quote, detailed findings concerning the integrity oversight monitor s provision of services and recommendations for corrective or reimmediate yell action relative to malfeasance and inefficiency. they are supposed to be taken and given to the state legislature so lawmakers and citizens can keep tabs on the
shenanigans and didn t want anybody watching what they were doing. that s certainly a possibility. it is just incredible to me. i get this every day, steve. the public wants to know, am i on a waiting list. people don t know what the criteria is or what the waiting list consists of or when they are going to get off of the waiting list. if this had been in place, hgi and others would not have been able to get away with whatever they did. that would have prevented them. they would have had to have criteria and been out in the open. the lack of the monitor is significant, because it made it possible to do things wrong or even illegal. we wouldn t be sitting hearsaying, whatever hgi did. i want to thank kevin walsh and congressman, frank pallone, who will be joining us later in the show. coming up, the big, big story out of last night,
has been given a monitor. we asked the same about an hgi contract, was it given a monitor. we asked how many contracts are out there worth more than $5 million, how many of them currently have monitors, how many have waivers? the statement we received back did not answer these specific questions. we contacted them again with a follow-up question asking whether we were interpreting their statement correctly that prior to january, 2014, there had been no integrity monitors in place. we did not hear back from them. we will continue to follow up on this. then, there is this. one of the firms that answered the state treasury department s call for proposals way back when the law was first enacted was ernst & young, a highly respected accounting firm. you can see their april 8th, 2013 proposal to provide program and process management auditing, financial auditing and grant management and integrity monitoring and anti-fraud services for disaster recovery from hurricane sandy.