The money wasn’t altogether lost. And it appears to involve only federal, not state, funds. (Not that that should be viewed as a mitigating factor, your honor!)

But this sort of thing does little to boost taxpayers’ confidence that our elected officials has adequate safeguards and monitoring in place to prevent the waste, fraud and abuse of hard-earned tax dollars, whether for current programs or the impending Tolls of Damocles.

Rhode Island overpaid insurers more than $200 million during its expansion of Medicaid, one of several examples of “significant deficiencies” in the state’s financial controls and bookkeeping identified by Auditor General Dennis Hoyle in a report released Monday.