Firing state employees (even taxation employees) isn’t a solution to budgetary shortfalls

In a move by the Virginia Department of Taxation that will offend few Virginians, the state agency intends on scrapping its Criminal Investigative Unit, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch. The move by Virginia’s taxation police is expected to save $120,000 a year.

The Richmond Times Dispatch reported that two investigators will be fired and four other members of the Criminal Investigative Unit will be reassigned to different areas of the agency’s compliance department, effective July 1.

Joel Davison, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Taxation, says the agency will continue to hand over research data associated with tax returns to the offices of local prosecutors as requested.

So one question that arises is, why did the agency need this unit in the first place? It would be a terrible irony if the ‘unit’ charged with catching Virginian’s cheating on their taxes was one of the biggest tax cheats in the state.

While I’ll leave government bashing to those on the right, there is a shred of legitimacy to the constant bad-mouthing of government inefficiency that goes on by those on the political right.

With that said, moves like this by Virginia’s government is laughable in terms of the actual dent it makes in Virginia’s overall scheme of debt reduction and “belt-tightening.”

What the government of Virginia should be focused on is investing in better roads and better schools for ALL Virginians to turn this state into a brain-trust that would make Mr. Spock look like Mr. T.

The politics as to why such ‘commonsense’ solutions have been so elusive is as transparent today as it was over two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome: take the road most traveled and go for the easy political wins (i.e., firing government employees) even if those wins are, at best, short term.

Then again, maybe if we’d start looking a little bit deeper into the cozy relationships between big-wig business elites and their political puppets in the Virginia General Assembly and across the high echelons of Virginia’s bureaucracy, we’d see more clearly why straightforward and rational decisions are all too often disregarded for the difficult and absurd. Governor McDonnell had a Ferrari, E-I, E-I, O!