{"id":115324,"date":"2026-01-08T09:24:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T09:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/115324\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T09:24:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T09:24:06","slug":"brickbat-texas-two-step","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/115324\/","title":{"rendered":"Brickbat: Texas Two Step"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A report by the Austin City Auditor&#8217;s Office in Austin, Texas, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kxan.com\/news\/local\/austin\/austin-energy-employee-allegedly-paid-980k-to-fictitious-vendors-city-auditor-says\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">found<\/a> two former city employees defrauded the city government out of $980,000. Auditors found that while working for Austin Energy, Mark Ybarra made payments to 22 &#8220;fictitious vendors&#8221; that he had created, with addresses linked to himself or his relatives, and submitted fake invoices to cover it up. The report also mentioned Ybarra&#8217;s wife, Ambrosia Ybarra, who previously worked for the city&#8217;s Watershed Protection Department, and it singled out two Austin Energy managers for approving payments based on invoices they &#8220;should have identified as questionable or illegitimate.&#8221; The couple have each been indicted by grand juries for felony theft, while the managers have not been charged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A report by the Austin City Auditor&#8217;s Office in Austin, Texas, found two former city employees defrauded the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,50709,50710,27],"class_list":["post-115324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-brickbats","tag-government-employees","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}