There is little supervision of how the budget money has been spent by the several governmental agencies, because everybody is more interested in getting money than managing it afterwards. Agencies may have different accounting systems, no legislation or common rules to follow, no annual reports and many are just impossible to audit.
In the UK in 1994 for the first time a parliamentary committee consolidated 17 separate reports on public expenditure, cataloguing mismanagement, incompetence, waste and fraud, and noting 26 different scandals involving millions of pounds. These ranged from unnecessary first class travel and free house deals to massive waste under such headings as "doubtful and incorrect payments to training providers". The report indicated that it had noted a number of serious failures in administration, financial systems and controls within government departments and other public bodies which had led to money being wasted or otherwise improperly spent.
Nearly one-third of the $200 million spent by the government of the USA from 1988 to 1991, to clean up the worst toxic waste sites in the United States, was spent not to clean up anything, but to pay the administrative expenses of private contractors. The Environmental Protection Agency, which ran the cleanup programme, explained the money was gone to "programme management" - a loosely defined category of overhead covering everything from fringe benefits to office rents, business cards and parking fees of the engineering firms hired to carry out the work.
In 1992, 15% of Russia was unsafe for human habitation due to effects of toxic waste dumping. Britain, for comparison, had 0.002 per cent land area classed as contaminated.