Little paper trail of ARPA funds

Do you want to know how your tax dollars are being spent? Good luck, at least when it comes to Wisconsin’s share of the federal American Rescue Plan Act. That legislation gave states big chunks of money to help them make ends meet during the height of the pandemic. Wisconsin received $2.5 billion in ARPA funding, with no real restrictions on how it could be used. In the more than year and a half since Wisconsin hit the jackpot, no one can seem to say for sure just how the money has been spent. Much of the money was transferred to cities, towns and counties to help them bounce back from the pandemic. But there has been no full audit of the state’s spending of its share of the federal money. The Legislative Audit Bureau has conducted two small audits that examine a tiny fraction of the spending. They don’t tell us much. But we know at the federal level all that spending led to some waste, fraud and abuse. We can only assume that is also true in Wisconsin. But if we don’t know how, or even if, the money has been spent, we certainly don’t know if it was spent wisely, or if it was misspent. Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent, especially when the state comes into big sums of money from the federal government.