Roughly half the municipal employees in Boscotrecase, Italy (population 11,000) have been arrested for fraud.
The employees clock in, sometimes for each other (with boxes over their heads), but don’t show up for work.
The arrested are accused of fraud against the state. As a result, there are not enough people to run the town. Services are shut down.
Please consider Not Enough Staff to Run Italian Town after Arrests for Bunking Off Work.
The mayor of a small town outside Naples had to shut down most municipal offices after police arrested 23 of his staff in the latest revelations of absenteeism in Italy’s public sector.
Staff were filmed clocking in and then leaving to go about their personal business or using multiple swipe cards to register absent colleagues, police said, in scenes that have become familiar after numerous similar scandals.
A police video showed one man trying to tamper with a security camera and then putting a cardboard box over his head to hide his identity before swiping two cards.
Police arrested around half of all employees in the town hall offices of Boscotrecase following a weeks-long investigation that they said revealed 200 cases of absenteeism involving 30 people.
“I’ll probably have to shut down the town hall,” Pietro Carotenuto, elected a month ago as mayor of the town of 11,000 people, told Sky Italia.
Those arrested, accused of fraud against the state, included the head of the local traffic police and the head of the town’s accounting department.
Warning: Don’t Try This at Home
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I am SURE you would find more of the same here in the USA – especially in places like Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore.
So what? Federal, State, and local government employees in the U.S. are paid handsomely with salary, benefits, and dream pensions for protected positions where hours are regular and VERY well defined, overtime is generous, and advancement depends on reinforcing the ‘status quo’ of uninspired mediocrity. There are protected races/cultures where firing is difficult except for serious incompetence or crimes, and the politicians who enlarge these employment roles can count on 3 votes for every 1 job to vote in their favor. Do you think that the vast majority of these tax money guzzlers could do anywhere near as well in the private sector? Not hardly.
Best to stop feeding the beast by minimizing your tax contributions to the government, and let the system work on resetting itself. Learn to get along with less.
Holy Cow! How in the world do you fight such corruption?!
Off topic, but kinda a head’s up in the usa:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-13/be-aware-not-there-national-day-rage-july-15th-2016
It could get even uglier before this finally dies down.
Why should they be different from our all examples in Bruessel? In 2013 a Dutch journalist, Tom Staal, filmed MEP’s (members of parliament, the EU-parliament) when clocking in to get the 258 brit. pounds for overtime.
5 years earlier another group of journalist filmed MEP’s clocking in on Saturday morning,
suitcase in hand and leaving right away, direction airport.
So what are the Italian controlers complaining about?
The new mayor is worried he might have to close town hall; place seemed to work fine without the absentees
The only difference between Italy and America is that the Italian municipal employees are held accountable for their scams.
Government employees in America are the least productive workers with well above average pay (for their skill sets) and retirement benefits that your average private sector worker would die for. The ones in my neck of the woods retire at age 55 with 81% of their final paycheck. The safety employees can retire at 50 with 90%. And many retire on disability scams that exempt much of their retirement benefits from taxation.
Don’t be naive enough to think that the same scams in Italy aren’t happening here. That’s the normal course of business when managers are not held financially accountable for operations in thier departments. At the end of the fiscal year the department heads clammer for their employees to spend (waste)whatever money is left in their budgets so that they can demand more in subsequent years.
If you question what I say spend a few hours at your local government motor vehicles office just to observe the employees behind the counter. And those employees are under the public eye. Imagine those who aren’t.
I’m in two minds about all this given that there are many people in positions of authority that I would definitely not want taking a more active roll in running anyone else’s business , but then I am not the sort who believes in paying people to go away, as they inevitably make a business out of it .
And if someone attempts to clean house the government workers just gang up and vote them out of office. They’re replaced with someone who’s willing to play ball. Everyone’s happy, right?
I dunno…. there’s whole departments in the federal and state gubbermints that I think if we paid them NOT to show up for work it would be money well spent….
There are usually two sides to every story.
I would guess there are 3.628 sides to every story
For economic stories, multiply by 10 or 100
No different here,, They exist just to serve themselves and the perception image for the public ( The gullible public )
Cheers David
As silly as this is, I do think America would be a vastly improved country if Obama, and all congressmen and senators, showed up in Washington with a cardboard box over their head for their first day of work, and then just went away for 4 years……..
Italians are just lazy. In America we take more care and are less obvious with our fraud and graft. That is until we get too big and powerful to prosecute then we just openly break the rules.
Italians are not lazy. Italians built this country. LITERALLY.
please dont criticise those poor, underpaid council workers in some small pointless town somewhere in the South of Italy.
Please consider the European Parliament instead.
Exactly the same as Boscotrecase, Italy; except for 1 small difference…
European Parliament members get a damn side more pay, to say nothing of the perks.
(oh, make that 2 small differences, (well maybe delete the word small.)
I like their use of cardboard boxes, because You can also think of the European Parliament as 1 giant metaphorical cardboard box;
because, as i understand it, the European Parliament doesnt actually do much in the way of
making policy (those matters are largely if not exclusively made by the Politburo, or is it the Council of Ministers, as they say in euroland.), so all those times i’ve actually been voting for UKIP, and other parties over the years has been a complete waste of time.
So all those speeches etc you see from the European Parliament are, just as we all suspected, a lot of hot air.
Or, as other people see it, just a piece of entertainment which we can see on our TVs whenever we want to watch some Comedy show.
There are government employees here on ~A70k salaries making ~A230k. They do nothing / sleep / run a business during the day, but can’t do any work because of “change control”. Then they “work” all night and all weekend on over time rates.
Ahh, graft is a very common thing when no-one is watching. Add in government unions, and I’m sure some senior people find out but just ignore for expediency.