Fiscal Intelligence

“Our $559,667 sample also included four coaching-related payment requests, totaling $12,530, for training and meeting expenses. We found that three of the four sampled coaching-related payments, totaling $4,135, were not adequately supported. None of these three payment requests contained copies of the bills for which NYCLA requested reimbursement, such as an invoice from the venue in which a meeting was held.”

“The DOE contracts with three Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) vendors to purchase computer hardware for use by students, teachers, and administrative staff.  DOE entered into contracts totaling $209.9 million with Apple Inc. ($105 million), Lenovo Inc. ($81.9 million), and CDW Government LLC, for Google Chromebooks ($23 million).”

“From 2014 through fiscal 2017, for the first time on record, New York City’s pension contributions exceeded actual and projected (mostly bond-financed) capital expenditures. In other words, the city has been spending more to meet its pension obligations than to build and renovate bridges, parks, schools, and other public assets. In fiscal 2018, roughly 57% of contributions will be needed simply to continue paying down what the city still owes its pension systems, in order to continue paying benefits promised to retirees. The rest will cover the “normal” cost of added benefits earned by city employees. In other words, if the pension systems had been fully funded in the past, the city would have saved more than $5 billion.”

“By nearly every relevant metric, the U.S. leads the world in science and technology. With only about five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. employs nearly one-third of all scientists and engineers and accounts for approximately one third of global R&D spending (U.S. R&D spending of over $300 billion is as much as the rest of the G-8 nations combined).”

“The report goes on by saying that pension costs are now almost $2.9 billion a year, – an increase of $2.3 billion, or 370 percent since 2002.”

https://fiscalintelligence.org/2013/05/18/the-pension-pain/

“You would be surprised that in some schools, the restriction appears to be implicitly understood, since they neither have a line for temporarily restricted funds on their balance sheet nor the statement below in their respective financial statement notes”.

“The “universal service fund” pays for E-Rate with a 17.9 percent tax on long distance telecommunications. The term may sound odd; “long distance” is an artifact of the past for most Americans. However, international calls over the plain old telephone network are still made, mostly by Latin American migrants living in the U.S. The telecommunications levy hits them particularly hard. More affluent households, on the other hand, use Facetime, Skype and other apps that avoid the tax.”

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/08/stop-spending-money-connecting-schools-to-the-internet-000191