California's obvious embezzlement scheme:

California Is Hiding $300 Billion A Year In Spending From The Public, Claims It's For The People's Own Good

SATURDAY, DEC 11, 2021 - 07:30 PM

By Adam Andrzejewski. the CEO/Founder of OpenTheBooks.com; originally published on Forbes

In 2018, California resident Steven Childs wanted to know how much the state paid to a single vendor over a five-year period. Instead of the data, California Controller Betty Yee sent him an invoice for $1,250. Childs asked more questions and the Controller’s chief counsel, Rick Chivaro, admitted the state held electronic records and “warrant records” akin to “maintaining a checking account online.”

Today, in a Sacramento superior court, the controller denies having a checkbook and claims the warrant register doesn’t contain vendor information. The Golden State is the only state in the nation not to produce state spending under open records laws.

Our organization at OpenTheBooks.com is battling the controller in this case over our freedom of information request for the entire line-by-line state vendor checkbook. When the controller rejected our request, we sued.

Yee is claiming her office “couldn’t locate” a single payment. No, that’s not fake news, or a comedy punch line. California’s top financial officer actually argued this in court recently, despite admitting she paid 50 million individual bills last year.

Furthermore, the controller now claims that transparency itself is an “undue burden.” She swears it's necessary to take 72,000 work hours to go through each of the 50 million payments by hand.

Here are some of the arguments Yee is making to stonewall our request:

“In order to produce checkbook level data as requested … staff would need to manually review the estimated 50 million transactions …”

“The public interest served by not disclosing the requested records and data clearly outweighs the public interest in disclosure. As such, the [State Controller’s Office] is relieved of any obligation to produce the requested records.”

Do we have a representative republic if the representatives get to hide all transactions from the people—and claim that it’s for their own good?

More:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-hiding-300-billion-year-spending-public-claims-its-peoples-own-good