By Fred Palm, contributing editor  |  The role of a government inspector general is much in the news lately.  The position has evolved from military tradition to ensure that government-funded entities use taxpayer money in careful, frugal and legal manners.  We don’t want, for example, our hard-earned tax dollars wasted, ripped-off, squandered, thieved or frauded.

The inspector general was first used here during our Revolutionary War. General George Washington smartly recognized that his militia leaders and those that reported to them sometimes distorted, exaggerated and plain lied about their fitness and capabilities. 

Washington appointed an inspector general modeling a practice of the Prussian Army, then the world’s elite war-fighting army.  Back then, one of the practices of the Prussian Army was to require field inspections for war-fighting fitness to be conducted by knowledgeable staff who were independent and outside the reporting chain of command.  They were intentionally free from the obligation to follow orders.

Washington and his command staff used an inspector general to provide a potential pathway for the truth. The obligation of Washington’s inspectional forces was to objectively determine capability and to accurately report on the conditions …