No, I'm talking about the former senator installed by our governor who fleeced the place and then fled:
In his 17-month stint as UF president, Ben Sasse more than tripled his office’s spending, directing millions in university funds into secretive consulting contracts and high-paying positions for his GOP allies.
www.alligator.org
"In his 17-month stint as UF president, Ben Sasse more than tripled his office’s spending, directing millions in university funds into secretive consulting contracts and high-paying positions for his GOP allies.
Sasse ballooned spending under the president’s office to $17.3 million in his first year in office — up from $5.6 million in former UF President Kent Fuchs’ last year, according to publicly available administrative budget data.
A majority of the spending surge was driven by lucrative contracts with big-name consulting firms and high-salaried, remote positions for Sasse’s former U.S. Senate staff and Republican officials."
Under Sasse’s administration, two of his former Senate staffers — Raymond Sass and James Wegmann — were among the highest-ranking and highest-paid officials at UF. Both worked remotely from the D.C. area, roughly 800 miles from UF’s main campus in Gainesville.
Sass, Sasse’s former Senate chief of staff, was UF’s vice president for innovation and partnerships — a position which didn’t exist under previous administrations. His starting salary at UF was $396,000, more than double the $181,677 he made on Capitol Hill.
Wegmann, Sasse’s former Senate communications director, is UF’s vice president of communications, a position he works remotely from his $725,000 home in Washington, D.C.
Salaried at $432,000, Wegmann replaced Steve Orlando, who made $270,000 a year in the position and had nearly 30 years of experience in media relations at UF before he was demoted to be Wegmann’s deputy."
Sasse appointed his former Senate press secretary, Taylor Sliva, as UF’s Assistant Vice President of Presidential Communications and Public Affairs, a new position. Sliva’s $232,000 salary made him the second-highest-paid employee in UF’s Office of Strategic Communications and Marketing, trailing only Wegmann.
Sasse raised his former Senate staffs’ salaries at UF by an average of 44% compared to their Capitol Hill pay, contributing to a $4.3 million increase in presidential salary expenses over Fuchs’ last year in office.
In Sasse’s first full fiscal year at the university’s helm, travel expenses for the president’s office soared to $633,000 — over 20 times higher than Fuchs’ annual average of $28,000. Sasse spent more on travel in his 17 months at UF than Fuchs’ entire eight-year tenure."
So they did an audit and found waste and abuse. As a result of this, they had to implement new purchasing controls to prevent this in the future:
A preliminary report from the Florida Auditor General found UF failed to prevent former President Ben Sasse from leveraging his executive privileges to inappropriately spend university funds.
www.alligator.org
"In its preliminary report, the Florida Auditor General recommended a slew of changes to university policies meant to tamp down on improper spending out of the president’s office, including greater oversight of the president’s hiring decisions.
“Absent appropriate controls, there is an increased risk of wasteful, fraudulent and abusive travel expenses,” one recommendation read.
UF trustees passed
new measures in December addressing some of the state’s concerns, including a
rule requiring the president to get Hosseini’s sign-off before booking non-commercial flights. The rule explicitly bans university-paid flights for personal or political activities. "
Tony Soprano would be proud. Now that your eyes are open to government waste and fraud, one would think you'd agree with me that this is disgusting. BUT, "You like those blinders firmly in place though for one reason or another."
