320 MISC. PUBLICATION 218, U. 8. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
was literally nothing to audit. ‘Thousands of dollars have had to be 
spent to straighten the course and improve the grades of roads that 
someone had laid out ‘‘with his eye.’”’ Tax records have been so 
inaccurate and incomplete that property owners have been known to 
escape paying taxes for years without being detected. And the work 
of local untrained assessors is so universally deficient that it need 
only be mentioned to elicit a smile. Wager (166, p. 78) says: 
A few conspicuous forms of waste which are manifest in almost any rural 
county are: (1) too many officials and deputies for the amount of work to be 
done; (2) the employment of officials who are unqualified for their work; (3) 
the constant ‘‘breaking in” of novices both as chiefs and clerks; (4) losses in 
purchasing supplies because of the lack of centralized systematic buying; (5) 
interest patd on temporary loans and loss of interest on temporary balances; 
(6) costly and dilatory methods of collecting taxes; (7) abuse and neglect of 
public property; (8) lack of any systematic accounting in some instances and 
duplication of accounts in other instances; (9) idleness or lost motion on the part 
of public emplovees because of poor planning and poor management; (10) losses 
resulting from delinquency or insolvency on the part of officials and taxpayers; 
(11) laxity and inequality in assessing and listing property; (12) unnecessary 
overhead because of a duplication of county institutions. Sometimes there is 
deliberate fraud—bribery, patronage, embezzlement—but the losses from such 
causes are nowhere near as great a drain on the treasury as these hidden and 
innocent leakages. 
These losses are, of course, not all attributable to the lack of trained 
administrators; some are due to errors of judgment on the part of 
the policy-determining body. But even the errors of the governing 
board have been largely due to their lack of an executive agent. 
The North Carolina Tax Commission, in its 1930 report (80, Rept. 
1930, p. 14), states: 
We believe the time has come when serious consideration should be given the 
general subject of a recasting of the administrative set-up of county government 
It must be apparent that there is too much diffusion of executive responsibility, 
and that a concentration of this responsibility that would bring all administrative 
affairs within its control would produce more efficient and economical government. 
Likewise a Virginia commission on county government, in a recent 
report (164), says: 
County government as now constituted in Virginia is complicated, overelabo- 
rate, unduly expensive, and largely removed from popular control. * * * This 
organization usually consists of some 30 or 40 administrative offices. These 
offices depend upon widely varying sources of authority. ‘They are partly con- 
stitutional and partly statutory, partly elective and partly appointive. Some are 
headed by individuals; others are headed by boards. Many offices have apparently 
been tacked on to meet new demands as they arose; others have been continued 
for little reason except that they have come down from past generations. There 
are in the county scores of officers of one kind or another, some with jurisdiction 
extending over the entire county, others with jurisdiction limited to their respec- 
tive magisterial districts. * * * To add to the confusion, there is no central 
authority in the county; little or no unifying financial control; no head of the 
county government at all. 
The laxity which has prevailed in the collection, custody, expendi- 
ture, and accounting of public funds has been especially costly to the 
taxpayers. Even when there has been no deliberate fraud, recurring 
losses because of bad judgment and expensive audits because of 
tangled accounts are quite as unfair to the taxpayers. Systematic 
accounting and rigid fiscal control are a protection not only to the tax- 
payers but to the officials themselves. Tax collectors and treasurers 
frequently know nothing about bookkeeping and get their accounts 
hopelessly tangled. In one county it was reported that it cost $15,000 
