Colorado Division of exaggeration
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The Colorado Division of Securities isn’t shy about promoting their alleged success stories cracking down on white collar fraud. Officials in the Department of Regulatory Agency routinely take turns congratulating each other in news releases.
One big problem. They are grossly exaggerating their financial success for Colorado taxpayers.
Take Securities Commissioner Jerry Rome.
Since he became head of the agency in 2014, he has spent three times more money prosecuting cases than they have really collected for Coloradans.
In October of 2015, the Securities Commissioner was thanked for the $10-million-dollar judgement against John Koral of a company called U.S. Capitol. The company had filed bankruptcy five years before. Records provided by the Securities Division shows as of this Spring, investors and taxpayers have never gotten a penny from the court decision. It is not clear what efforts, if any, the Securities Division took to actually get the money back.
“Commissioner Rome should put out the real story. Are these long investigations paying off for Colorado taxpayers and the investors who really lose money,” says Wayne Dolcefino, President of the investigative communications firm in Houston, Texas. “What’s the point of promoting all this money you won, if you never plan to collect it?”
Dolcefino is a former investigative reporter with 30 Emmys, and multiple other investigative awards to his credits. His firm exposes government waste and corruption.
Since 2011, official records of the Colorado Securities Division actually show a truly dismal collection rate from fraud cases.
A spreadsheet provided by the Division of Securities shows the agency won judgements and court orders totaling more than $122 million dollars for investors and Colorado taxpayers. There are dozens of news releases promoting the cases and the victories.
You know how much they have collected in the agency?
A little more than 3 million dollars.
“The legislature should take a hard look at the priorities of the division, and whether getting judgements against people that are long gone and not paying accomplishes anything. It will be interesting to see how many cases they have lost, or if this a game of bragging about money no one will ever see,” says Dolcefino.
This coming year the budget of the Division of Securities is more than 3.5 million dollars.
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