Deputy Inspector General, Montgomery County Maryland

>> My name is John Hummel [phonetic] I'm the Deputy Inspector General for Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D. C. I usually get a chuckle when I tell people that what I do is I fight fraud, waste, and abuse every single day. And in a way that's what we do, I'm in charge of, you know a number of people but that's our mission. In private industry they have positions called Internal Auditors, and those are people who are a part of management but they critically evaluate the internal controls and processes and procedures. But they are guided by and subject to the control of the CEO of the organization. Inspectors General in most cases, in fact every case I can think of, are totally independent of the organization. We in our case work for county counsel, not for the county exec. The country exec can't fire us, really only county counsel has an impact on what we do and even they are kind of hands off, we're pretty darn independent and able to write what we think. We get all kinds of complaints and issues brought to us, we have a...it's called a hotline but it's basically a telephone number people can call and they do. And that's one of the most, to me, positive attributes of this job, is that we actually answer the phone and we talk to taxpayers and these taxpayers are calling us quite often it's an absolute last resort, it's like I tried this department, I've tried this...I can't any resolution and these guys are ripping me off, that kind of thing. And so that's very fulfilling to be able to address their concerns in areas like worker's compensation, for example, we get a lot of calls complaining about guys, usually guys, who are getting worker's compensation checks every week, very month, and yet appear to the whole world totally healthy and possibly doing another job. So, for example, that's an area where taxpayer money is going to something it just shouldn't be spent on and that's just one example there are a whole bunch of others. First of all I'm in charge of a number of people so I might have two people, let's say, who are working on separate projects; we call them preliminary inquiries. These are situations where we got a call from somebody, or we got an e-mail or even a letter and that the call or e-mail may have been anonymous or they may have given us their name. We always tell people that if you...we can't get back to you with the status of things if you don't give us your name so they have to decide whether they want to come forward or not. But these two people are working on different issues brought by different taxpayers and the one thing that we do try to do if we're given a name is to get back to your complainant and let them know the status of things and ultimately what was done with what they had a problem with. So that's pretty much the day, it's in the office, which is where we spend most of our time.