No more Ray-Ban government

State Auditor Dave Boliek and his team are doing the people of North Carolina an amazing public service. Each of them should be awarded the Order of the Long Leaf Pine after just a year in office.

They are helping redefine what it means to be an honest public servant and make sure every tax dollar paid by hardworking citizens is being used to solve the problems we all want government to solve.

In July, Boliek’s office released a pretty damning audit of the way Cary, a Wake County town and suburb of Raleigh, had issued 628 Visa cards to 62% of town employees and rung up transactions totaling more than $24 million ostensibly made solely to conduct town government activities. Included in such purchases was a $1,600 charge to buy 10 pairs of Ray-Ban sunglasses for town council members.

If anyone can explain how purchasing sunglasses is going to fill a pothole or educate a child in Cary, then more power to them.

Another eye-opening purchase was a $4,164 dinner for the town council and staff at Rey’s Restaurant, a fine-dining steakhouse in Raleigh.

There was an eye-popping $3,419 charge for a penthouse stay for former Town Manager Sean Stegall, with the operative word being “former.”

Many on the Democratic left became fairly apoplectic when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) started peeling back the layers of wasteful spending in the federal government in the early days of the second Trump administration. They claimed essential services were being cut off unnecessarily — but in the process, they wound up defending wasteful spending in government everywhere by simply denying it exists.

People on the left who are concerned about social programs to help the poor and defenseless should be leading the charge against wasteful spending. One dollar of tax money spent on Ray-Bans is one dollar less that can be spent to help feed the poor, house the homeless or fix any pothole around town. A dollar stolen or wasted from any government till is a dollar that cannot be spent to help the people the left says they want to help.

People on the right have been rightly incensed about waste, fraud and abuse from the beginning of the republic. They believe they can spend their money better than any elected politician or unelected bureaucrat. They rightly know that every dollar they don’t send to a government authority cannot be wasted or stolen by someone they don’t know or will never meet.

Boliek’s audit team has found tens of millions of dollars of financial irregularities in Rocky Mount and Cary. If that amount of fraud and financial malfeasance can be found in the 20th- and seventh-largest municipalities in the state, respectively, what is going on in all the others? And for how long has it been allowed to happen?

Some want to discount such discrepancies as simple “rounding errors” or “decimal dust” in the grand scope of things. The total spend in all North Carolina cities and towns exceeds $10 billion, so just a 2% error rate amounts to $200 million of taxpayer dollars being wasted annually in municipal governance. Consider what could have been done with that money in terms of providing better roads and education or childcare assistance.

I recently had a conversation with a tax accountant who was in the middle of finishing up tax returns for people who had filed for extensions in April. He said the hardest thing for him to do was to tell them their $5,000, $10,000 or $50,000 check had to be sent by the deadline to various levels of government — although he had no way to guarantee them their money wouldn’t wind up being sent to Somalia, passed to the hands of fraudsters or wasted on unnecessary credit card payments made by civil servants such as what happened in Cary.

He genuinely felt conflicted by doing what he was supposed to do by helping prepare tax returns.

At what point will the people of North Carolina and America rise up and demand that every tax dollar they spend is 100% guaranteed to be spent on the purposes intended as passed and signed into law? When it comes to being forced to pay taxes to local, state and federal governments, the very least taxpayers should expect is every dollar is going to benefit the public as a whole and not elected officials or their staff.

Boliek and his team should investigate the budgets of every municipality in North Carolina, and when he is done, examine every department in state government. While he is at it, perhaps he and his team can take a look at the federal government now that Elon Musk has moved on to other things.