The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I see this a lot in government.
Take the Mississippi Transparency Act of 2008. This law requires the creation of an online database detailing state expenditures. What a great idea!
The law also empowered the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration to build and run the website providing taxpayers searchable data on incentives and recipients, total statewide expenditures and agency contracts. You can check out the website at transparency.mississippi.gov.
There is a downloadable Excel spreadsheet that contains a whopping $18.8 billion dollars worth of state expenditures for the year 2014. That’s a lot of money – about $19,000 per Mississippi household. Much of this is federal money distributed by the state.
Included in this mammoth list is $600 million in expenditures marked “confidential.”
Now I don’t know about you, but a transparency website is not very transparent if 600 million dollars in transactions is marked “confidential.” This strikes me as meeting the definition of irony.
I emailed Chuck McIntosh, director of communications for the Department of Finance and Administration (DFA), about these “confidential” listings.
His response: “According to the folks who keep up that site, each individual agency who has posted those vendors have, for one reason or another, flagged that information ‘Confidential.’ I’m working on trying to determine why, and it will be tomorrow before I can reach any of those agencies.”
A few weeks later, I emailed Chuck again to see if he had a better answer: “Not yet. I’m still trying to get a better answer about the reason for the ‘confidential’ designation. Thanks for the follow up email.”
That’s the last I heard from him.
In addition to the “confidential,” expenditures, there’s another $3.4 billion where the vendor name is simply blank. Much of this seems to be payroll data, but there is no explanation of this.
It’s also worth noting that the latest data is 2014, which is over two years old. It seems to me, improving Mississippi’s transparency website is not a high priority at the DFA.
The report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group rated the states on transparency websites. Mississippi got a C+.
Steve Wilson, a writer for Mississippi Watchdog, reported on the mediocrity of Mississippi’s transparency efforts.
DFA Director Kevin Upchurch told Mississippi Watchdog via email the site is an excellent tool for taxpayers, but it’s still a work in progress. Upchurch said the site costs about $300,000 per year to run and no extra employees were hired at DFA to solely administer it.
“This website has been a work-in-progress from the beginning and we continue to make improvements,” Upchurch said. “We’re proud of the site and we think it’s incredible the way it gets so much good information out to the public with the click of a few buttons. In the past it would take weeks to gather that information and get it to someone.”
Upchurch said improvements he plans for the website include enabling fewer clicks to get taxpayers data they want and adding more query options for searching state contracts.
When you realize just how much money runs through the state coffers to contractors, you may begin to understand why I have been championing procurement reform in Mississippi. We are making progress but we still have a long way to go.
Several states received “A” ratings for their transparency websites including Ohio, Florida, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Wisconsin, Indiana and – this is a shocker – Louisiana.
The biggest “confidential” expenditure in the “transparency” spreadsheet was – you guessed it! – the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC), with a $111 million confidential expenditure.
This whopper was described as a “contractual service.” Further details included the cryptic code: PERSNL SER CONT-OTR FEES PSCRB. Hmmm . . . I wonder if former MDOC Commissioner Chris Epps was involved in this.
Number two at $75 million comes from “Rehabilitation Services.” Further information is not very revealing: “Subsidies, loans and grants for disabled assistance.” The vendor is, of course, CONFIDENTIAL!
Number three on the confidential list, at $60 million, is back to “Corrections” for “Other Contractual Medical Services.”
Emergency Management comes in at number four on the confidential list with $42 million in “subsidies, loans and grants.”
Apparently state travel is top secret in Mississippi with about 15 million dollars spent on “confidential” travel.
The biggest user of confidential travel is Human Services which spent $6.7 million in “personal services” in-state travel. The Health Department was number two with $4.9 million in confidential travel.
There are literally hundreds of curious confidential expenditures of $500,000 here, a million dollars there.
For instance, the Public Employees Retirement System had a mere $627,000 in confidential INVEST MANGR & ACTUARY SERVICE – whatever that is.
The Department of Mental Health paid $500,000 to a confidential vendor for “food for persons.” I could go on and on.
It’s one thing to pass a transparency law. It’s another thing to make it work properly. Mississippi has a long way to go before its $18.8 billion in expenditures is properly monitored and accounted for.
