Accountability in government is all the rage these days.
It’s about time.
State revenue grows each year, but the pressure to spend grows even faster. Much of that pressure is justified – education and transportation investments are sorely needed, for example. But charges of government waste, real or imagined, are repeated over and over as reasons to hold back on such investments. Government isn’t accountable, critics charge. Bloated and inefficient, it can’t be trusted to deliver on the promises it makes to spend taxpayer money effectively.
Such charges are easy to level and hard to refute. To get past them, government at all levels should welcome the chance to maximize its own effectiveness and prove that it has done so.
Enter Initiative 900, which would require performance audits of state and local governments – everything from the biggest state agencies to the smallest drainage districts. In between, the measure would require the state auditor to measure the performance of counties, cities, school district and transit agencies. It’s a measure that can build real trust between taxpayers and government, trust that can finally be parlayed into needed investments in our future.
Opponents of I-900 argue that it’s unnecessary because the Legislature passed and the governor signed a performance audit bill earlier this year. I-900 goes further, though:
* Rather than applying just to state agencies, it will build trust at all levels of government.
* It gives the state auditor true independence in conducting performance audits and selecting the agencies to be audited. The Legislature’s version creates an oversight panel of people selected by lawmakers and the governor, and it would choose who gets audited. That’s too close to a fox-guarding-the-henhouse structure to win the complete confidence of taxpayers.
* The initiative provides a dedicated funding source, 0.16 percent of the state sales tax – currently about $20 million for each two-year budget cycle. The legislative bill requires funding action by lawmakers, and its funding currently is capped at $2.8 million per biennium. The higher cost of I-900 figures to pay off many times over in savings from improved efficiency.
What is a performance audit? It examines a government program’s practices and outcomes, identifying wasteful procedures and seeing whether a program is achieving its goals and objectives. Essentially, it finds out whether government is doing its job as well as it can. The state auditor would work with agencies to come up with performance benchmarks and measure performance against them. Where an agency comes up short, the auditor would help it find ways to improve.
The Legislature’s bill and I-900 are both steps in the right direction. To maximize the gains in public trust, voters should approve the more far-reaching approach of I-900.
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