$200 Million of Your Money Wasted
Hawaii State Procurement squanders cash and delays services
For most people, government is simply the sum of the services it provides: security and safety, for example, in the form of police and fire departments; education, in the form of schools and libraries; and transportation, in the form of roads, harbors and airports. Citizens can measure their government by how effectively it provides those services.
Businesses, though, often see another side of government. That’s because the state government relies on private contractors and consultants to provide many of these services. Contractors design and build the state’s schools and highways; consultants manage everything from state hospitals to social services. Indeed, government is the largest single customer of Hawaii businesses, spending more than a quarter of the state’s $7 billion budget on contracted goods and services. With billions at stake, clearly another measure of government is how efficiently and fairly it procures those services. And yet, by almost any measure, the state’s procurement process is broken.
The easiest way to gauge how dysfunctional the system has become is to glance through reports from the state auditor’s office. In department after department, report after report, procurement practices are found wanting. Indeed, many of the most prominent controversies faced by the state government in recent years have been procurement failures at heart: Two 2009 audits criticize the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism for flouting procurement laws by awarding a contract to a firm with ties to the department’s director rather than higher-ranking competitors. The latter DBEDT audit goes so far as to recommend the director’s removal.
Full article [Hawaii Business]
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