Salt Lake Telegram | 1937-08-20 | Page 4 | Lost in the Crowd

Lost in the Crowd A STARTLING story comes out of Washington Washing-ton about government employe who was so lost in the host of clerks that he was able to perpetrate a gigantic fraud against the people of the country and take a fairsh fortune from " "The treasury over period' trf years without -de tection. It seems doubtful that his peculations will ever find their way back into the govern' ment's strongboxes. Reno E. Stitley was a voucher clerk in the park service in Washington, drawing $2300 a year. But it cramped his style. Through his hands passed vouchers to pay for work in CCC camps. So Stitley created a CCC camp in his own mind, invented names of imaginary people on the payroll, imaginary projects, and even wrote imaginary complaints from the imaginary workmen. More important, he cashed the checks with which the government paid the. imaginary workmen. Fantastic? Certainly! Yet Stitley got away with it for three years, swindling the government govern-ment out of more than $84,000. The shuddcry thing about this is that it took three years to catch him and find out that this tax money had been tossed into a CCC camp that didn't exist. And that speaks more than a big volume on the dangers of a great centralized bureaucracy.