Public Procurement, is it an issue that we need to be talking about?

Over the last couple of months, the number of stories regarding Public Procurement and the misuse of taxpayers money seems to have skyrocketed. For example, the 2 day Bigfoot Hunt sponsored by $7,000 of taxpayers money and the £2,400 spent on McDonald's by Welsh Council officials. My question is simple, do we have a fundamental problem with how we spend taxpayers money or are we simply finding problems for the sake of finding problems? As a whole, do we need to trust public spending or do we need to start scrutinising? I also wanted to mentioned that this a generalisation into public procurement and I recognise that there are plenty of individuals working in public procurement and doing a fantastic job, especially with their hand tied due to the sheer volume of red tape legislation.