**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**
April 16, 2019
Contact: Ray Wolff,
Chairman, Libertarian Party of Manatee County
[email protected]
BRADENTON, Fla. – Do you have a photo of local county, city employees or elected officials wasting taxpayer dollars? Now you have a way to report it anonymously.
The website GovStoppers.com went live this week to offer Manatee County residents a new way to anonymously report government waste, fraud and corruption. The website provides visitors a safe, anonymous place to post photos and documents without those posts being ever traced back to them.
The project is the brainchild of the Libertarian Party of Manatee County.
“While some agencies may have ways to report fraud, often a report must be made to the very agency involved, for example the School Board
website,” says LPMC Chair Ray Wolff. “This is bit like the fox watching the hen house. GovStoppers.com is a better way to make such reports.”
Wolff says local Libertarians seek to establish more transparency and accountability to Manatee city and city government with GovStoppers.
“As the Libertarian Party of Manatee County, we see one of our roles as a third party is to bring openness, trust and transparency to our local government,” Wolff says. “With help from the public and government employees, GovStoppers can be the impartial and anonymous way to bring local government waste and corruption to light.”
The website is built with anonymity in mind, said Wolff. The site uses anonymous third-party messaging and email to access GovStoppers and send files. Its photo upload feature does not log or store information that could link the photos with the sender.
Wolff says Libertarians, despite being America’s fastest growing political party, it continues to face ballot access restrictions engineered by Democrats and Republicans. The restrictions are clearly intended to discourage independents and third-party candidates from winning office and affect political change for the better, he says.
“Even with those limitations, Libertarians can promote change in our local Manatee government,” Wolff says. “Although we are hopeful that our local government agencies are free from fraud, bribes, nepotism, misuse of resources, bribes, employee waste and corruption, GovStoppers.com is here should they need to be reported.”
— xxx —