Diamond Jewelry valued at $3,700; all-inclusive one-week Caribbean vacation, $2,200; five football season tickets, $2,000; one divorce lawyer, $1,000; assorted “Girls Gone Wild” videos, $300. Where does one go to sign up for such a cornucopia? The federal government, of course. That’s the word from the Government Accountability Office, which presented yesterday its report on waste and fraud in just a couple components of Washington’s multi-billion-dollar hurricane recovery package for the Gulf Coast. The title of the GAO report sums it up nicely: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Disaster Relief: Improper and Potentially Fraudulent Individual Assistance Payments Estimated to Be Between $600 Million and $1.4 Billion.”

Forensic accountants at the GAO turned their horn-rimmed glasses only to relief spending that benefited individuals, such as housing assistance grants and those famous $2,000 debit cards, and what they found will distress any taxpayer. The Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to control the spending at all stages in the game, with predictable results. One individual was paid $19,636 in a debit card, rental assistance, and personal property replacement after suffering damage to a building in which she had never lived. Another received $7,328 for damage to a property the person had stopped renting a month before Katrina hit. Another collected $6,161 after listing as a primary residence an apartment building where no one has ever heard of him. Fraud was rampant. One individual collected $139,000 after filing a total of 13 claims, only one of which used the registrant’s real Social Security number.

FEMA appears to have been relatively unbothered when problems were called to its attention. As part of the audit, GAO registered a few fictitious individuals to find out whether FEMA would be able to detect them. Of all the charts included in the GAO’s report, the most illustrative is a photocopy of a check for $2,358 FEMA wrote to one of those fictitious residents even after FEMA’s inspector had reported that the registrant did not live at the address on the application and after a separate inspector at the Small Business Administration reported that he couldn’t find the supposedly damaged property.

FEMA instituted these programs under intense political pressure to do something to help the people the agency had supposedly failed during the storms, and given the large number of storm victims, the short time frame, and the confusion on the ground, perhaps a certain amount of waste was inevitable. The GAO report suggests, however, that FEMA neglected to take even relatively simple steps to cut down on abuses. For example, it didn’t require hotels to collect FEMA registration numbers from recipients of housing aid, a step that would have helped detect the sort of double-dipping recounted in this report.

We still do not know how much taxpayer money has been wasted in hurricane relief. The GAO suspects it has understated the abuses because its analysis didn’t investigate full-blown insurance fraud. It only caught the people who weren’t making much of an effort to conceal their wrongdoing. This report is well timed, however, coming as Congress is revving up for another budgeting season. The amount of new monies for Gulf Coast rebuilding is sure to be a big issue as the budget debate unfolds. The GAO has reminded any congressman who will listen that it’s not always how much money you spend that matters, but how you spend it.