State Jobs: Long-unfilled positions should be eliminated
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Remember the bunch of politicians who swept into state office eight years ago with the promise to "right-size" state government and weed out fraud, waste and abuse of the system? They've not made nearly as much headway as many had hoped.
But perhaps part of the reason for that is the enormity of the problem. It's not easy to discover all the ways in which taxpayer money is being thrown away when it is part of the very fabric of state government in West Virginia. Over the weekend, lawmakers heard an enlightening report from the Legislature's Performance Evaluation and Research Division, which details an audit that showed more than $226 million was appropriated in the fiscal year 2022 executive budget in salaries and benefits for 4,857 vacant positions funded by both state tax dollars and other sources of state and federal funding.
"Each year, several millions of dollars are appropriated for budgeted vacant positions, many of which have been vacant for several years with no evidence that agencies are trying to fill them," said Lukas Griffith, senior analyst for PERD.
House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, voiced what many of us must have thought when he said simply "Wow." He added, "In four years of sitting on this committee that has to be one of the most informative reports I've ever received."
Informative, yes. Now lawmakers had better do something about it.
In private business, if a position has been vacant for years, with little to no effect on the operation, that position goes away.
With King Bureaucracy, things are different. In fact, some have already leapt to claim the legislature should not be too hasty in addressing the matter.
" … in many instances the budget bill provides permissive language that allows those agencies to transfer those funds that the Legislature has appropriated for personal services and employee benefits," said Michael Cook, director of the State Budget Office. "That was one of the main concerns I had when I read the report. I didn't want it to have the appearance that there were just millions of millions of dollars that could be swept in savings."
But the audit showed in most cases the state departments and agencies are NOT moving these unspent funds.
Lawmakers are in Charleston to represent and serve us, not themselves and not the bureaucracy. Given the information they received Sunday, they know what they need to do.