For those taxpayers who wonder about the efficiency of their own Oklahoma state government, they have been handed yet another head-scratching incident. A SNAFU is what one state official called it. And we all know what SNAFU means.
The Oklahoma Agriculture Department admits it owes $55,000 to another state agency but it can’t figure out which one. The political website, NonDoc quoted Agriculture Secretary Jim Reese as admitting his agency has not been able to determine which agency gets two payments—one for $14,000 and the other for $41,000.
The confusion came about after the U.S. Treasury withdrew $835,000 in federal funding from the department in a move to resolve a billing dispute. Those state agencies that lost federal funding were notified by the state Office of Management and Enterprise Services they had to reclaiming the money from the State Ag Department.
But Reese said the two payments are pending because state workers have not been able to identify which agency will get them.
“We have a ZIP code and an agency number that doesn’t correlate to anything Oklahoma has,” Reese told NonDoc. “It says ‘Department 2563’. So we don’t have a place to pay.”
OMES hasn’t been able to identify the state agency either.