Are you being served?
Gordian knot in government remains intact
“Aah! I see you have the machine that goes ‘ping’. This is my favorite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way, it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.”
(clapping all around)
“Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best.”
—hospital bureaucrat in
The Meaning of Life
ARKANSAS’ Newspaper served up a double header recently when it comes to government and bureaucracy. Thank goodness for the legislative auditors employed by the state, or We the People may never hear of these sort of things.
Two stories were combined in one. First, this state’s Department of Human Services appears to have gone around the Legislature’s intent to hire a highly paid consultant from UAMS. The deal involved Dennis Smith, who was the chief of federal Medicaid operations under President George W. Bush, and therefore must bring with him knowledge of the labyrinth through which federal dollars must travel in order to reach our state’s people.
No doubt Mr. Smith’s knowledge is of great value to DHS, since on Sept. 1, 2016, DHS entered into a memorandum of understanding with UAMS under which UAMS agreed to employ Smith as a nontenured visiting faculty member from Sept. 15, 2016-June 30, 2017. The Human Services Department was to reimburse UAMS for 90 percent of Smith’s salary and fringe benefits based on those totaling $294,000 a year. That, according to the paper.
The idea was for Mr. Smith to work a 40-hour week and provide DHS with the equivalent of 36 hours. And UAMS was required to invoice the department on a monthly basis for the salary and fringe benefits. Smith was expected to teach or co-teach at UAMS or provide and report for courses for administration for 10 percent of his employment. Got all that?
Fortunately, the arrangement caught the attention of some folks up on the hill in Little Rock, including Deputy legislative auditor Jon Moore, who wonders if the Memorandum of Understanding between DHS and UAMS wasn’t meant to get around the intent of state law and the Arkansas Constitution. Sen. Terry Rice (R-Waldron) has asked for more information from DHS before acting on the audit that turned up this business.
Gentle Reader, we’re willing to accept that nobody at DHS or UAMS meant to get around the law, but what worries us is the degree of bureaucratic complexity that our state and federal governments have reached. This sort of stuff would take a legislative auditor to figure out. And did.
That’s not all the news out of that story. The second part of the doubleheader concerns the purchase of furniture for the Human Development Center at Conway. The Human Development Center is “a residential facility for people with developmental disabilities,” or the mentally handicapped, known in less-euphemistic times as the least of these, for whom our state’s Department of Human Services is supposed to be looking out.
We’re pretty certain that it wasn’t the best use of your money, Mr. and Ms. Taxpayer, to purchase $209,542 worth of stuff from one furniture store in Conway, by means of 187 separate invoices for “identical or similar items” bought “through small quantity procurements that circumvented competitive bidding procedures.” And along with deputy legislative auditor Jon Moore, let’s also “question the salvaging of $30,915 in assets of which 73 percent were less than one year old.”
THE TAXPAYERS of Arkansas have got to expect some waste, fraud, bureaucratic expansion, and plain old sneaking around in a state agency with a budget of about $2.6 billion. And, by our count, 41 career and professional staff making over $100,000 a year in a state with a median annual household income of about $40,000. The Arkansas Department of Human Services was created in 1971 in order to bring together a host of smaller state agencies created to serve human welfare—the state hospitals, the Arkansas Children’s Colony (now the Human Development Center), the Arkansas Department of Mental Retardation, the State Department of Public Welfare, the Rehabilitation Service, the Arkansas Commission on Alcoholism, and the Workmen’s Compensation Commission—among others.
DHS has gone through various reorganizations and attempts at streamlining in the almost half-century since its formation, but it seems only to grow more complex, more and more a place where employees might get away with a quarter-million dollars’ worth of misspending here, a quarter-million dollars’ worth of misspending there . . .
The good news, Gentle Reader: The snoops in those legislative auditors’ offices know math, too. And they tell folks when it doesn’t add up.