Subject: MP to Coburn & FRC: Audit SF Health Dept.'s AIDS office, NOW!
From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 22:23:33 EDT

Rep. Tom Coburn
US Congress
Washington, DC

May 29, 1998

Dear Congressman Coburn,

I need your help convincing the General Accounting Office to conduct an audit
of the San Francisco Department of Health's AIDS Office.  Most, if not all,
federal AIDS dollars that flow into SF go through this AIDS office and very
little of that money can be accounted for.  Whether we look at AIDS housing,
social service or prevention federal dollars, we can't follow the money trail
very well.  

It is nearly impossible to find fiscal data showing if and how public dollars
reached the intended client and/or target population.  And if we can, there is
no mechanism to judge if the client was satisfied with services, or if the
service was effective.  As you can imagine, this AIDS office, burdened with
over 120 employees, rarely can provide a direct reply to my queries about
fiscal oversight.  Practically every employee of this bureaucracy has an
excuse why the federal monies can't be tracked.   

It is time to audit how the AIDS office has managed the millions of federal
AIDS dollars that have passed through its hands.  I want federal auditors to
come into San Francisco to examine the lame fiscal controls at not just the
AIDS office, but also at the subcontracting nonprofit AIDS agencies.  No
matter where I look at the AIDS office, answers about federal contract
monitoring are not within reach.  The same can be said of the private AIDS
groups,  especially the Rev. Cecil Williams' Glide Memorial Methodist Church
run subsidiary Glide Foundation agency, even though they are heavily
subsidized with public funding.

Who exactly at the General Accounting Office do I need to turn to launch an
investigation of how the SF health department's AIDS office spent the vast
sums of federal tax dollars?  How soon can federal auditors begin such an
audit?  You must understand the desperate need for oversight of AIDS programs
in San Francisco, and I urge you to hear my pleas for help in working my way
through the GAO maze.

If you could find out this information for me, I would be most appreciative.
Any assistance your office can provide in bringing about accountability of
both the public health officials in San Francisco charged with battling AIDS,
and their counterparts in the the nonprofit sector, would do much to keep
people with AIDS alive longer.  We need better assurance drugs, food, and
rental subsidies are guaranteed for AIDS patients, and careers of AIDS
bureaucrats are jeopardized due to corruption.  

Two prime examples of how AIDS money is squndered with impunity in SF:

1)  More than half a million tax dollars allocated through the AIDS office to
the National Task Force on AIDS Prevention can not be accounted for.  Stories
about lax fiscal controls as this group have appeared in the gay media for
eight months.  Yet, the city earlier this week approved providing this agency
with enough money to stay open until 2002.

2)  Even though gay men comprise 80 percent of the AIDS caseload, only
$150,000 was spent last year by the city for a temporary condom program in gay
bars.  There is no continual supply of condoms in gay bars in SF even though
millions of federal prevention dollars are shipped here every year.  Why are
more  AIDS dollars spent on prevention surveys, than on prevention tools?

I think too many AIDS dollars are spent on maintaining an elaborate AIDS
industry in San Francisco, choking with overeducated executives, managers and
social workers who are more dedicated to the survival of their careers than
with meeting the vast needs of people with AIDS.  I hope to be proved wrong on
that assumption, but answers will be forthcoming only when the federal
government audits AIDS programs here.

Please contact me as soon as your office locates the right person for me to
bring my demands for an audit of the SF AIDS office to at the General
Accounting Office.

Sincerely,
Michael Petrelis
Member, Accountability Project
San Francisco, CA
1-415-621-6267

cc:
Steven A. Schwalm; Family Research Coouncil, Washington, DC