The Political Chase

Giuliani Shag Fund Excuses Highlight Poor Executive Management

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

As everybody knows, Rudy Giuliani is plagued with account after account of corruption and scandal, which in turn requires numerous responses. Nobody — politician or otherwise — has an infinite supply of reasonable excuses and plausible deniability to defend a long-standing background of impropriety and corruption. When a cover-up strategy is employed, at some point the “excuses” given reach an incredulous level and/or expose other problematic areas. It is clear Giuliani’s campaign has reached that threshold as it tries to defend Rudy in his Shag Fund scandal.

Via Josh Marshall:

Earlier this evening we noted that the new line from the Giuliani camp is that the Shag Fund’s convoluted financing was put in place to help the cops on Rudy’s security detail. Giuliani spinmeister Joe Lohta told the AP that “was necessary because the police officers did not make a lot of money and their department took up to two months to repay them for their travel expenses. So Giuliani’s office got a credit card and paid it off with funds from the various agencies.”

Lohta gave a little more detail to Newsday. Lohta told the paper “the practice started when officers on his security detail complained that the police department was slow to reimburse them for rental cars and lodging.”

Focusing on the scandal, Josh appropriately and accurately notes it does not “tell us anything about why the expenses were squirreled away in the budgets of obscure city offices.” However, the excuse given also delivers a blow to the one of the two foundations of Giuliani’s campaign — national security (9/11 hype) and his stellar record of executive management as Mayor of New York City. Giuliani’s rationale shows profound poor management from multiple perspectives, all of which Rudy should have been aware of, and if he was the superior executive he proclaims to be they would not have been issues.

Assuming the response is true, it is clear Giuliani’s management did not provide adequate policies and procedures to accommodate basic travel expenses at a relatively minute level. It’s not like the city suddenly encountered a major issue that resulted in an unexpected high volume of travel. Providing security for the mayor was a known factor, and if there were some additional security requirements as presented, it certainly would not have been on a scale to disrupt the entire administrative process.

If expense reimbursement took two months to process, then a major management area in his administration (e.g., expense payables, accounting, etc.) was by definition dysfunctional. Proof of poor management of the administrative functions is only bolstered by the shifting of funds from various agencies. Any junior-level undergrad majoring in business, finance, or accounting could rip this entire scenario to pieces.

Then there are the human resources issues. We know most local law enforcement officers are not compensated in the six-figure range, therefore why were these security officers expected to bear the burden up front of known travel costs? The Mayor’s security requirements were known in advance, therefore why weren’t the officers provided properly allocated credit cards allowing them to do their basic jobs? And furthermore, based on the excuse given, one could easily infer that Rudy was not properly compensating law enforcement officers in general.

If Saint Rudy of 9/11 could not manage simple issues such as travel for his security detail, is he qualified to manage the entire U.S. government and the trillions of dollars associated with it?