Sound Off Louisiana – Page 167 – Providing Louisiana citizens, from VIPs to the "little guy," a chance to sound off regarding Louisiana government issues of concern to them.

With Gov. Edwards declining to adhere to his Honor Code, open appeal issued for Attorney General Landry to intervene and recover $168,000 in taxpayer losses at hands of Edwards’ drug-addict Auction Board member Jacob Brown.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards who, via his Executive Counsel, Matthew Block in an email of September 27, 2018, stated that he will NOT adhere to his West Point Honor Code and demand payment of $168,000 from the Louisiana Auctioneer Licesning Board resulting from funds absconded from taxpayers via state surplus auctions awarded to one of his drug-addicted appointees to the Board, Jacob Brown.

Sound Off Louisiana subscribers are familiar with our September 10, 2018 open challenge to Gov. Edwards to demand payment from the Louisiana Auctioneer Licensing Board (LALB) to reimburse taxpayers for the $175,000 in funds one of his appointees, Jacob Brown, fleeced us out of upon Louisiana State Police arresting Brown for writing two checks totaling just over $175,000 to the state which bounced (more details available here).

Gov. Edwards’ office did respond to us indicating that Gov. Edwards would not be making such a demand of the LALB notwithstanding the detailed statements we provided his office entailing LALB members openly advocating that the agency self-insure against these type losses because of the huge cash hoard it has accumulated. Gov. Edwards, in a response through his Executive Counsel, Matthew Block, sent to us on September 27, 2018, indicated that the most the Edwards administration is willing to do is to sue Jacob Brown, which they did on July 6, 2018.

Well, at today’s (November 5, 2018) LALB meeting, attorney Anna Dow reported that the bonding company has already paid the lousy $10,000 bond applicable for Brown to the LALB, and she wanted lightening-fast approval of the Board to issue checks to four aggrieved parties with the proceeds being pro-rated. As we noted in this feature, the State will get the lion’s share of the bond payment as a direct result of Gov. Edwards and Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne aiding and abetted Brown’s Ponzi scheme. How? They agreed to let him conduct yet another auction (NSF check notwithstanding) only 39 days after a $27,000 NSF check was known to exist on a prior state surplus auction conducted by Brown. The highly predictable result was yet another NSF check to the State for $148,000. That $148,000 NSF check constituted a needless and totally-avoidable loss to taxpayers, which vastly inflated our losses and also drastically reduced any payment to private-party clients of Brown from the bond coverage because of the pro-rating formula. As depicted in the following brief video from today’s LALB meeting, the State will receive $7,000 of the $10,000 bond payment:

LALB votes to issue check of $7,000 to State of Louisiana (making the net loss to taxpayers $168,000) provided the State of Louisiana agrees to hold the LALB harmless!!

Notice what we have placed in bold just below the preceding video. The LALB is insisting that the State of Louisiana hold the LALB harmless as a condition of accepting the $7,000 payment! Why should the State (i.e. us taxpayers) do that? After all, it was this Board who voted NOT to increase any bond coverage and stated “we can cover any losses!” Now, Gov. Edwards was challenged to make good on his Honor Code by insisting, based on his own appointees’ words that they honor THEIR OWN COMMITMENT to cover such losses, that the LALB remit a check to the State of Louisiana for the $168,000 (net of bond payment) we’re now out. As noted above, he has now failed his own Honor Code miserably by admitting that he is NOT going to seek payment of the $168,000 loss balance from the LALB. Much easier to seek yet more tax increases we assume!

Our original plan was to draft a certified letter to Attorney General Jeff Landry asking him to intervene on taxpayers’ behalf and sue the LALB to recover our $167,000. However, given how fast the LALB wants the terms of this bond payment to be accepted by the State, there is simply no time for a formal certified letter. Accordingly, we are now scrambling to get subscribers to contact AG Landry and not permit the bond payment to be accepted with that stipulation attached to it.

On Monday, October 29, 2018, a very prominent state public official contacted us and wanted to know what Gov. Edwards’ response to our challenge was. We talked with this official for well over an hour. We are now going to reach out to him and ask that he contact AG Jeff Landry to seek to have him block any acceptance of this bond payment with that stipulation attached to it and also to pursue suing the LALB to recover our taxpayers dollars.

It’s our sincere hope that Landry will do so and that he will have yet another instance of suing Edwards and/or his appointees in court and walking away with yet another victory.

We respectfully ask that you join us in those efforts by contacting Attorney General Jeff Landry’s Office via email ([email protected]) or by phone (225-326-6705) and join us in our efforts, and let’s get our $168,000 back!

Look for further posts on the LALB entailing actions at its last two meetings in coming weeks (though for those curious, here’s today’s meeting in its entirety), but this is a top-priority item we felt was needed to be distributed ASAP because the LALB members are scrambling to get that check issued with a signed “hold harmless” stipulation from the State of Louisiana which we believe is very much unwarranted in light of the LALB’s culpability for causing such a massive hit to taxpayers!

If you would like to be added to our Sound Off Louisiana email list to be notified of future posts, simply go to our home page and scroll to the bottom (mobile devices) or to the top of the right-hand column (desktops). Supply your email address within the subscribe box. You’ll then receive an automated email from Word Press, and all you have to do is click on the blue “confirm follow” bar contained within that email, and you’ll begin receiving great posts such as the preceding one above.

Presenting Robert Burns’ payroll fraud deposition video as a means to let subscribers know he’s still alive.

Former Louisiana Auctioneer Licensing Board attorney (and former Louisiana State Senator and convicted felon) Larry S. Bankston, whose questioning of Robert Burns in a deposition on February 6, 2014 is the most-watched video ever published by Burns even though it has never been published on his Sound Off Louisiana blog .

A most gratifying event transpired last week. Two very dedicated Sound Off Louisiana blog followers called founder Robert Burns by phone and asked if everything was all right and expressed concern that no post had been published for a little while.

Obviously, those were inquiries for which we are most grateful. The reality is that, on Wednesday, October 24, 2018, Burns experienced a “toothache from hell,” which resulted in him scheduling an immediate visit to his dentist. Upon inspection of said suspicious tooth, his dentist immediately issued antibiotics and scheduled root canal surgery for the following Wednesday, October 31, 2018 (last Wednesday). The root canal was a success; however, to say that the ensuing pain thereafter was excruciating would in no way be an understatement. Accordingly, as most can imagine, it’s not very conducive to appear in front of a camera to publish a feature even for a short one which would be overshadowed by the pain of a tooth, especially when that intense pain had radiated both to the jaw and the right ear.

Rest assured, however, Burns will be back making posts in short order, and we’ve got some intriguing posts to distribute! In the meantime, we’re sending out this feature just so folk can know Burns is okay, and we’re going to kill two birds with one stone.

We’ve been asked numerous times what our most watched video in our history is. We’ll provide a two-part answer and, in the process, provide one video to debut for the first time ever on Sound Off Louisiana.

1. The most-watched video originally issued as a Sound Off post is the infamous hostile exchange between Louisiana State Police Commission members Jared Riecke and Lloyd Grafton, which can be viewed as the THIRD video on this feature (the action got heated at the 1:20 mark of the video). As of this publication, that video had 1,685 unique views. The second most-watched video entailed the recent Coach Goode feature, for which there are 1,080 unique views as of the publication of this feature.

2. Videos referenced in # 1 notwithstanding, BY FAR, and we certainly mean BY FAR, the most watched video associated with Sound Off Louisiana posts, even though we’ve never even posted it to Sound Off Louisiana because the video was produced 15 months before the Sound Off blog was formed, entails a segment of the payroll fraud deposition regarding the Louisiana Auctioneer Licensing Board (LALB) wherein Burns was deposed and questioned by the LALB’s hired gun, convicted felon Larry S. Bankston. It’s about a seven-minute clip, and we’ll let it make its Sound Off debut at this time because of the sheer number of unique views by the general public. which stands at 42,327 at the time of this publication (easily tens of thousands of views higher than the next-closest video) as well as the public comments beneath it, which stand at 72 as of this publication:

Six-minute excerpt of payroll fraud deposition wherein Robert Burns is questioned by convicted felon Larry S. Bankston on February 6, 2014, only 59 days after the Inspector General’s Office issued this damning report wherein Edmonds was cited as “being paid while out of the office performing no public purpose.”

Regarding Mr. Bankston’s constant harping on whether Burns had ever made a Facebook friend request to Edmonds’ husband, Matthew, who is an interior designer himself and Edmonds was investigated for payroll fraud entailing that agency as well (and the above linked report is equally applicable for the Interior Design Board as it is for the LALB), it’s an open question why Bankston would redact out the top of a screen shot he asserts is one of a list of Matthew Edmonds’ friend requests. When he indicated to Burns in the video above, that he “is representing to you (Burns) that this is a screen shot of his Facebook friends requests,” Burns came incredibly close to responding: “Well, you are a convicted felon who has served 33 months in Federal prison for accepting a bribe as a sitting Louisiana State Senator, so forgive me, Mr. Bankston, for my unwillingness to accept ANY representation you make as being truthful!” As is evidenced by the video, Burns opted not to hit Bankston right upside his forehead with a two-by-four.

The bottom line is this: Burns never made a Facebook friend request of Matthew Edmonds (or certainly not knowlingly), and he did not do so for a specific reason! It was Matthew Edmonds who was posting Facebook accounts of the Edmonds family on various excursions such as vacationing in Disneyworld, visiting relatives in Kansas, going sightseeing in New York, etc., all while his wife, Sandy, was simultaneously reporting being “on the clock” (with BOTH boards) for those same time periods! It was also Burns who turned all of that documentation over to the Office of Inspector General after that office began an investigation of Edmonds after Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera turned the matter over to the IG’s office after his own office’s review of her payroll practices resulted in a report point-blank stating that both boards needed to recover monies improperly paid to Edmonds [Sidebar: Neither board recovered a penny from the overpayments Purpera asserts transpired; furthermore, the LALB, at its next meeting after the report’s public release actually granted Edmonds a pay raise, citing “all she had to deal with regarding public records requests” (for her own timesheets)].

Hence, it would have been utterly stupid for Burns to have Facebook friended Matthew Edmonds because such an act on Burns’ part would have tipped Edmonds off that Burns was monitoring his Facebook page! Burns kept waiting for Bankston to ask, “Have you ever visited Matthew Edmonds’ Facebook page?” to which Burns would have truthfully answered, “Yes.” Obviously, the reason for Burns visiting his page was to accumulate the aforementioned damning material. To this day, it remains a mystery to Burns why Bankston never asked that question (perhaps lack of understanding of Facebook?).

Interestingly enough, days after the Inspector General’s Office interviewed Edmonds about her payroll fraud, Burns was specifically blocked by Matthew Edmonds from visiting his Facebook page! Go figure!

So, sit tight. Sound Off Louisiana will have more intriguing posts in the days ahead once, and viewers won’t have to watch Burns reaching for his right jaw and menacing in pain! We give a special thanks to the two subscribers who called us. You know who you are, and we certainly appreciate your dedication and obvious strong interest in our blog!

In the meantime, if you have not voted early, don’t forget to get out and vote tomorrow!

DOA attorney Carlos Romanach testifies Commissioner Jay Dardenne, Gov. Edwards aid and abet Auction Board appointee Jacob Brown’s Ponzi scheme via green-lighting auction 39 days after $27,000 NSF check issued to state.

Disgraced former Edwards Louisiana Auctioneer Licensing Board appointee Jacob Brown.

In today’s Sound Off Louisiana feature, we provide irrefutable evidence that Louisiana Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne and his boss, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, aided and abetted the auction Ponzi scheme of Edwards’ Louisiana Auctioneer Licensing Board (LALB) appointee Jacob Brown. First, we’ll present a table timeline of how this transpired, and we’ll follow that up with a seven-minute video of testimony by Division of Administration (DOA) attorney Carlos Romanach, which provided the basis for the timeline:

Date	Event or Circumstance
Early 2017	Brown fails to pay numerous private-sector consignors instead diverting their money to fulfill a requirement by the State of Louisiana that $215,000 (the estimated gross sales price per auction) be provided upfront to auction state surplus property.
April 18, 2017	State awards auction contract to Brown.
July 8, 2017	Auction conducted. Balance owed by Brown: $26,920.58
July 18, 2017	Brown issues Whitney Bank check # 2502 dated 7/18/17 for $26,920.58.
August 1, 2017	Brown’s check returned NSF.
September 9, 2017	Brown is permitted to conduct ANOTHER auction for the state!!!!!!!! A FULL 39 days after obtaining knowledge of the above NSF check, Dardenne and Edwards permitted him to conduct ANOTHER FREAKING AUCTION!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 9, 2017	Auction conducted. Balance owed by Brown: $148,422.09.
September 21, 2017	Brown issues Whitney Bank check # 2514 dated 9/21/17 for $148,422.09. Why the state would think that check would clear given that the prior one had not been collected can only be described as utterly stupid accommodating on Dardenne and Edwards’ parts!
October 13, 2017	Brown’s check returned NSF (why did it take the state almost a month to deposit the freaking check — were they asked to “hold it” as a favor???).

We doubt anyone questions the entries on the preceding table but, just in case anyone wants direct verification, here is a 7-minute uninterrupted video segment of Brown’s July 9, 2018 hearing (which was uploaded by the LALB on October 8, 2018, a full 91 days after the hearing!!!!) wherein Romanach provides the material we present above:

Seven-minute segment of 7/9/18 LALB administrative hearing on former LALB member and auctioneer Jacob Brown (email subscribers may click here to see the video).

Now, folks, we ask our subscribers, if someone had written a hot check for $26,920.58, would you entrust them 39 days after you learned the check was hot to continue performing services for you? To our subscribers owning small businesses, if that $26,920.58 hot check had been issued to your business, would you continue doing business with the issuer?

Notice how Romanach, at the 4:20 mark of the video, cavalierly states, “At a subsequent auction……,” as if that’s just SOP of Dardenne’s DOA and JBE’s administration notwithstanding the fact they were still out $27,000 from his last auction 52 days before! That’s the fundamental difference between our subscribers, the vast majority of whom are small business owners, and state government officials, who show reckless disregard for taxpayer funds and instead bend over backwards to permit politically-connected individuals like Brown to bilk us for as much money as they can rather than taking the political risk of saying, “We can’t continue doing business with you.” One has to also openly question if such aiding and abetting constitutes a crime on the part of one or more individuals who made the decision to permit Brown to conduct another auction knowing full well that the NSF check remained uncollected from the prior auction!

What about all the private-sector victims of Brown? Perhaps they now have a very plausible cause of action against the State of Louisiana for their losses. After all, Jacob Brown was present for the July 11, 2017 LALB meeting. He was present for the September 11, 2017 LALB meeting. He was present for the November 6, 2017 meeting.

That’s plenty of LALB meetings for Jacob Brown to be masquerading around as an upstanding member of Gov. Edwards’ Board given all that Dardenne and Edwards knew about what was going on behind the scenes. Surely a few attorneys for the victimized private-sector consignors may see fit to sue DOA for aiding and abetting this obvious Ponzi scheme, no?

Under such a scenario, the state may assert that, “Well, we filed suit against Brown on July 6, 2018,” (Note: Romanach simply read the entire lawsuit into the record as his “testimony”). If so, a plaintiff attorney can counter that action constituted mere “window dressing” (good luck collecting on a judgment and, to date, Brown hasn’t even been served and Romanach, near the end of the hearing said that nobody knows where he is). That plaintiff attorney can further assert that DOA, Dardenne, and Edwards all had a duty to act almost a year earlier to shut this Ponzi scheme down and remove Brown from the Board and mitigate private-sector victimization.

Instead, now the State of Louisiana is likely to obtain the lion’s share of the lousy $10,000 bond. That’s the case because DOA, through its irresponsible action of permitting the September 9, 2017 auction even with an outstanding NSF check inflated its loss needlessly. Since the $10,000 bond will likely be pro-rated, that means DOA is going to get the lion’s share of that $10,000.

For those curious (as the private-sector victims no doubt are), the entire hearing is available by clicking here. Also, again for those curious, here’s the LALB’s findings of fact spelling out the three claimants (one of which is DOA) for whom bond claims are being processed by the LALB. Apparently, East Baton Rouge Parish is simply going to be out the $29,000 in unpaid sales taxes Brown stiffed it on, but for which they too, like the state, are suing to recover. Note also that an astute and dedicated subscriber has contacted us letting us know that the cover letter mailed by Executive Director Edmonds still identifies Bobby Jindal as Governor nearly three years after he has left office!

One of the most disheartening aspects of this whole incident is that, without Sound Off Louisiana, nobody would have a freaking clue any of this transpired! WAFB, no doubt in an effort to shield Edwards from adverse news, declined to even reference the fact Brown served on Edwards’ LALB right up to the time this whole Ponzi scheme blew up! Further, other media outlets like The Advocate haven’t even referenced Brown’s arrest at all, and certainly not the alleged theft of the taxpayers of Louisiana by an appointee of Edwards. In WAFB’s case, however, we need not worry. They’ll be only too happy to air “Honor Code” commercials again next year going on the assumption that Edwards has the unmitigated gall to deploy them again!