Governor Kevin Stitt played fast and loose with federal COVID relief funds. He tried to convert them to vouchers, which was not their purpose. Although the federal government was slipshod in handing out Payroll Protection Program (PPP) billions, it paid attention to misuse of state relief funds.
U.S. Department of Education auditors recommended clawing back more than $650,000 in misspent federal coronavirus relief funds from Gov. Kevin Stitt and reviewing an additional $5.5 million in purchases, according to a federal audit released Tuesday.
The questioned spending came from Stitt’s Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet program, which gave $1,500 grants to low-income families for educational purchases like computers and school supplies during the pandemic.
Auditors pinpointed questionable expenditures like arcade games, Christmas trees, smart watches, sofas, televisions and refrigerators totaling $652,720. The extraneous items made up more than 10% of all purchases. The $5.5 million is the total of purchases the auditors did not analyze and could contain unauthorized items.
The tally of noneducational items families purchased with program funds was higher than previously reported in a joint investigation The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch published in May.
The auditors also found poor record keeping for another relief program managed by ClassWallet called Stay in School. The program distributed tuition grants for up to $6,500 to students already attending private schools during the pandemic.
Auditors also found Oklahoma failed to follow federal guidelines for four of Stitt’s five educational relief programs, the report shows.
State officials gave the Florida-based company ClassWallet a no-bid contract to administer the Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet program and distribute grants to families.
Oklahoma could not provide supporting documentation that students who received grants were actually enrolled and registered at private schools, according to the audit.
Keep reading for more details.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
WHOA…GRAFT to the MAX!
I guess my name “Re-PUG-ni-CONS” FITS.
The Digital Wallet Program sounds more like a Digital Theft program
Fixed.
“Grifters gonna keep on griftin.'”
The Oklahoma GOP is certainly making über-Medicare thief Rick Scott proud.
Meanwhile, the GOP projectionists will keep attacking government programs that actually help improve the lives of ordinary Americans as “fraud” and “waste.”
Kevin Stitt: From Hustler magazine via thelostogledotcom – QUOTE: Oklahoma is the latest state reverting to the Dark Ages, when women had to use a coat hanger or seek a back-alley quack to get an abortion, thanks largely to Governor Kevin Stitt, another Bible-thumping Republican troglodyte. He signed off on the new bill that will charge any medical professional terminating a pregnancy at any stage with a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. The only exception is if the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life. Exceptions for incest or rape? None. [snip]
Kevin is the first state governor enrolled as a member of a Native American tribe—the Cherokee Nation. But after several public disputes with Oklahoma tribes over casino revenues, one Cherokee citizen launched a petition calling Stitt a “traitor” and seeking to revoke his citizenship as fraudulent. According to archived tribal documents from the early 1900s, the tribe once tried to remove Stitt’s great-grandfather, Francis M. Dawson, from the tribal rolls, alleging that Dawson had bribed a commission clerk around 1880 to list his family as Cherokee in order to acquire hundreds of acres of free land. According to High County News, a witness testified that Dawson presented only one person to verify his Cherokee blood, an Arkansas doctor of whom Dawson said, “…give him four drinks of Arkansas whiskey, and he would swear that black was white.” The federal government eventually overruled the Cherokee Nation on a technicality—the tribe had no legally binding policy for disenrollment—so Stitt’s potentially bogus claim to Cherokee heritage remains on the books. END QUOTE
Perhaps they should require Stitt to take a DNA test to see if his claim of being of Cherokee descent is provable.
Fascinating history of Stitt family.
Sounds like Kevin’s full of Stitt.