Richard E. Wise"
This kind of double-counting is the bane of every auditor's existence. That is all the more true when different auditors may be looking at different funds, which were authorized at different times under different administrations, with different authorities and different payees.
What's more, in light of recent events involving bonuses and who knew what when, it is hard to believe that anyone in the Treasury Department actually anticipated and designed a mechanism for preventing duplicate payments on the same troubled assets.
It is even harder to believe that if a Citigroup (which received $50 billion from the TARP fund and will soon receive $2.3 billion in counterparty payments from AIG) detected any such double payments it would volunteer to return the money to the Treasury. "Take the money and run like a bunny" would be their credo.
If you share this concern, feel free to copy the text of my letter onto your own stationery and send it to your elected representatives. Their addresses and fax numbers should be listed on their websites (I omitted them here for formatting reasons).
Then, if you receive any responses, feel free to post them as comments on this note.
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