If we play our cards right with the media, the Press will be our Inspector General’s Office. Encourage them to find any dirt on our programs and tell us. Then we can fix them or at least start to and everyone will be better off. We will learn of and fix out weaknesses, the press will have good stories, and the public will get better service. I can see some of you wondering what our own Office of Inspection is supposed to do. It is to find out about our problems before the press does, not to wait for complaints and then start looking. When a reporter comes to us with a scandal story of one of our programs, I would love to say, “Good reporting. That’s a serious problem and this is what we have been doing about it. Give us a hand and keep monitoring it, and let us know about our progress.” No one expects us to not have problems, but they do expect us to find them and fix them quickly, and that is what we must all expect of each other.
