Omahgosh! Who woulda thunk it???
You are NOT going to believe this. It turns out (are you sitting down?) that the Snyder administration (I still cannot believe this is true), through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, gave wildly inflated job creation numbers to the state legislature last spring.
INORITE???!
The Legislature was told April 1 that companies that received grants under the 21st Century Job Trust Fund’s Centers of Energy Excellence Program created 75% of the jobs they promised when they applied for the grants, according to the report by Auditor General Thomas McTavish.In fact, those companies — not counting one that went bankrupt — reported creating only 19% of the jobs they promised, the report said.
The fund’s failure to update its report to lawmakers with information it knew, combined with its failure to verify job creation numbers reported by the companies that received the grants, “may have negatively impacted the Legislature’s ability to correctly evaluate program results,” the report said. […]
One grant recipient reported in September 2012 that it had created 12% more jobs than it originally promised. The fund provided those numbers to the Legislature in April. In fact, that company went bankrupt last October and was sold to another supplier in January — information the Legislature didn’t receive.
You can read the audit report HERE (pdf).
The MEDC is calling it the result of “an oversight”. Simple mistake really.
The hilarious yet depressing part about this is that the program to create jobs only created three quarters of the jobs that were projected. That’s pretty crappy to begin with. To find out it’s actually less than a fifth is particularly depressing.
But, hey, 19%. 75%. What’s a little math error among friends, right? Can’t be having actual data and facts get in the way of a good Snyder campaign slogan about job creation and all.
Take it away Maxwell Smart:
[O RLY owl image credit: Pretty much everybody everywhere]
