JEFFERSON CITY - The list of Claire McCaskill’s failures in the state auditor’s office just keeps getting longer after officials discovered that while McCaskill was auditing the Springfield Municipal Court in 1999 more than $1 million was being embezzled right under her nose.

A report released July 27 found $1.2 million dollars or more disappeared from the court and that the fraud may have been going on for some time even at the time of McCaskill’s audit in 1999. Yet McCaskill’s office told KOLR-TV in Springfield that it wasn’t her fault the shortfall wasn’t discovered. “Audits are not absolute guarantees that there’s not something going on,” McCaskill spokesman Ken Kuster told KOLR. “(The audits) involved selective testing of transactions, sometimes randomly or we pick an attribute out to pick on. It’s not an absolute.”

The same kind of glaring professional failures seem to haunt McCaskill wherever she does business. For example, McCaskill recently told The Kansas City Star that her failure to disclose millions of dollars in assets from her various business dealings to the U.S. Senate Ethics Committee was because the process was “confusing.”

Meanwhile, McCaskill’s shoddy work ethic was exposed just last Friday when Cole County Circuit Judge Richard Callahan said that a financial analysis approved by McCaskill for a proposed constitutional amendment limiting state spending was “insufficient and unfair.”

Even though McCaskill’s office tried to blame someone else for her mistake, a top McCaskill staffer testified in May that he had mistakenly reversed the labels on a financial table related to the amendment. Cole County Circuit Judge Byron Kinder in April had the same opinion of McCaskill’s work when he called her oversight “insufficient and unfair.”

Further evidence that McCaskill continues to fail the Missouri taxpayers paying her salary is the fact she has produced a pathetic 40 audits through June of this year which is just ten more than she released at the same point in her rookie year of 1999, the same year she failed to expose the missing money in Springfield.

“Claire McCaskill’s pattern of professional failure is disturbing but her ability to try to pass the buck and avoid responsibility for these failures is even more disturbing. Claire McCaskill is not doing the job taxpayers pay her to do and even when she does it, serious mistakes like the one in the Springfield Municipal Court occurs,” said Paul Sloca, communications director for the Missouri Republican Party. “Claire McCaskill should be spending her time doing her job and making sure it’s done right on behalf of Missouri taxpayers rather than using her office to further her own political career.”