"If you put me back in there today, I could get each of you a check."

—tax scammer Harriette Walters, June 30

The greatest instance of municipal larceny in District history came to a quiet end this year with the sentencing of Walters, who led a ring that stole nearly $50 million from city tax coffers. Justice came for Walters in Judge Emmet Sullivan's federal courtroom, ending a string of pleas and sentences in the case discovered in 2007. But how much has changed since then? Natwar M. Gandhi, the man who oversaw the city tax office while Walters' scheme was absorbing enormous sums of taxpayer money, remains the District's chief financial officer. And Walters, while expressing deep regret and repentance upon receiving a sentence of 17-and-a-half years in prison, insisted in the above quotation that perhaps not all of the loopholes she opened have been closed.

More from LL's Quotes of 2009

In April 2007, Gandhi decided not to accept an offer to become Amtrak's CFO, and he told his employees in an e-mail about his decision. Walters replied to that e-mail, writing, "Sir, I would like to say thank you for keeping us inform of a decision that would have impacted the employees within the CFO Cluster. I appreciate that you respected us to provide follow up to the recent news reports that we read and heard over the pat week. Thank You!"

Replied Gandhi, "Thank you. Keep up the good work."

That's among the juicier revelations contained in the 122-page report that caps an yearlong investigation commissioned by the D.C. Council and performed pro bono by law firm WilmerHale and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. The report details massive failures in oversight and the existence of a "dysfunctional work environment" at the Office of Tax and Revenue.

The text of the report and highlights thereof to come.

UPDATE, 1:44 P.M.: A PDF of the report is available.

Here's what the report has to say about the "dysfunctional work environment" at OTR:

Many offices within the OCFO are beset by what might be described as a "culture of silence." In a nutshell, employees seem to have entered into an implicit compact not to question others' work, lest their own work be scrutinized. This culture of silence created an environment in which Walters could process real property tax refunds with little interference from her coworkers and managers. There were a number of indications suggesting that something was amiss in the Adjustment Unit, not the least of which was Walters' extravagant generosity toward co-workers. But no one spoke up, raised a question, or considered whether such generosity was appropriate. An anecdote perhaps explains the silence: when one senior OCFO manager asked his assistant, after the discovery of the fraud, why no one reported the misconduct of members of the Adjustment Unit, she responded: "snitches get stitches." When asked, during her interview, what she would have done if she had discovered a scheme similar to hers, Walters said she would not report misconduct of another Union employee.