Disability scandal is shocking, but not new

Why is state government always short of money in the face of what are said to be compelling human needs?

One reason is that compelling human needs are easily confused with human wants, which are infinite.

Another reason is that state government is not at all careful with its money, especially when the recipients are its own employees, who are well organized by their union and constitute the army of Connecticut’s majority political party, the Democrats.

That’s the lesson of the shocking report published last week by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers, written by reporters Jacqueline Rabe Thomas and Taylor Johnston.

The report focused on what it called the “curious” case of state Sen. Paul Cicarella, R-North Haven, who was working as a prison guard in 2008 when, breaking up a fight among prisoners, he slipped and injured his back. Doctors determined that while he had lost some back function, he remained able to do less strenuous work for state government. But no other state job was found for him.

So at age 27 Cicarella qualified for a lifelong disability pension even as he began work as a high school wrestling coach and private investigator. His disability pension was revoked when state government discovered he had found other work, but in 2021, just after Cicarella was elected senator, his pension was reinstated and increased by 84% for one year with retroactive payments. No one is explaining that.

The retroactive payments brought Cicarella’s 2022 pension to $412,000. Last year his disability pension was $66,000, on top of his other income, including his salary as senator.

The Hearst report found that the

Cicarella case is only a small part of the problem of state government’s disability pension system. “Many former state employees,” the report said, “collect disability pensions despite working new jobs and making significant income. Hundreds of recipients have not submitted surveys used to determine if they still qualify. State officials have routinely failed to find less-exertive state jobs for workers who were cleared by doctors for such a role after an injury.”

This problem isn’t new. The state auditors identified it in 2015 but nothing was done. In a case that may have been more outrageous than Cicarella’s, the Hearst report said a former state government nurse collected a $33,000 disability pension while making $792,000 at a pharmaceutical sales job.

Gov. Lamont, House Speaker Matt Ritter, and state Comptroller Sean Scanlon quickly pledged action on the Hearst report, which appears to have surprised them, though the governor appoints most members of the State Employees Retirement Commission, which decides on disability pensions, and the comptroller works with the commission in administering the pension system, which distributes $130 million each year. The governor said people will have to “play by the rules.” But to a great extent the rules themselves seem deficient.

While Democrats long have been

running state government, that the auditors identified the disability pension problem in 2015 suggests that the General Assembly’s Republican minority could have made it an issue long before the Hearst papers did. Indeed, state government is full of policies and programs that fail to meet their nominal objectives but don’t get the corrective attention they should, even when the auditors point them out. The Republican minority often seems too scared of alienating the state employee unions, as if the unions might someday support Republicans.

Also to be faulted here are the advocates of spending more on the supposedly compelling human needs going unmet. They never call attention to the waste, fraud, and corruption in government that divert money from compelling needs. Those advocates also seem too scared of the unions and to be operating on the premises that there can be no enemies on the political left and that all government spending is equally good.

At least Republicans are proposing to restore the legislature’s Program Review and Investigations Committee. That might be a start. But then would any legislators have the courage to serve on a committee tasked with exposing failures and improprieties?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.