State Auditor Elaine M. Howle just released a comprehensive report scolding government officials for the many computer glitches over the decades costing in some cases tens of millions of dollars. It highlighted the oversight that’s supposed to be done by the California Department of Technology:

“IT project oversight continues to be a high-risk issue, in part, because of the needed improvements in CalTech’s oversight discussed below and because of the negative impact to the state’s fiscal health when these IT projects fail. For example, between 1994 and 2013, the state terminated or suspended seven IT projects after spending almost $1 billion.”

That’s a lot of money that could have gone to schools, roads, health care or tax cuts.

Despite such failures, as of last month, California “had 45 IT projects under development that were under CalTech’s oversight, with a reported cost of more than $4 billion.”

The main problem is CalTech just doesn’t suspend dubious projects:

“Despite clear statutory authority to curtail troubled state IT projects, CalTech faces challenges in pursuing effective project oversight. One challenge is that CalTech lacks guidance in two critical situations: when CalTech management should suspend or terminate a project and when its independent project oversight (IPO) analysts should escalate concerns to CalTech management. In addition, CalTech does not formally set expectations for its oversight authority with sponsoring agencies — the state agencies that are implementing IT projects. This lack of communication may contribute to an environment wherein sponsoring agencies view CalTech as a service provider whose oversight they do not have to rigorously follow.”

The auditor recommended that, by Dec. 2015, CalTech develop “criteria” to properly intervene and, if necessary, end bad projects, specificially:

• “When and how IPO analysts should recommend corrective action and escalate issues to CalTech’s management.
• “What conditions could trigger CalTech to consider suspending or terminating an IT project.”

But when it takes years, even decades, do work through the court system, then that itself is a punishment.

But State Auditor Elaine M. Howle has found the courts don’t efficiently spend the money they already get. The long study title includes the conclusion: “Judicial Branch of California: Because of Questionable Fiscal and Operational Decisions, the Judicial Council and the Administrative Office of the Courts Have Not Maximized the Funds Available for the Courts.”

Howle first noted:

Public confidence in the judicial system stems, in part, from confidence that the system’s administrators manage its operations efficiently and appropriately. This report concludes that questionable fiscal and operational decisions by the Judicial Council and the AOC [Administrative Office of the Courts] have limited funds available to the courts.

State law affords the Judicial Council a significant amount of autonomy related to developing budgets and approving expenditures on behalf of the trial courts. With this autonomy, the Judicial Council has an obligation to act in the best interest of the public, especially during times of fiscal hardship.

Right. If you go to court over a property dispute, say, you want to be assured the court itself understands fiscal prudence. Especially in what still are tough economic times for many people, despite the economic recovery.

To maximize funding available to the courts, we expected that the Judicial Council and the AOC would have carefully scrutinized their operations and expenditures to ensure they were necessary, justified, and prudent. However, we found that this was not always the case. Specifically, the Judicial Council failed to adequately oversee the AOC—its staff agency that assists it in managing the judicial branch budget and provides administrative support to judicial branch entities. In the absence of such oversight, the AOC engaged in about $30 million in questionable compensation and business practices over a four-year period and failed to adequately disclose its expenditures to stakeholders and the public.

Furthermore, although state law authorizes the Judicial Council and the AOC to spend state funding appropriated for the trial courts on behalf of those courts, we have concerns regarding the appropriateness of some of the expenditures. Over the past four years, the AOC spent $386 million on behalf of the trial courts including $186 million in payments to consultants, contractors, and temporary employees using the trial courts local assistance appropriations; however, the AOC could have paid a portion of these costs using its own appropriation. If it had done so, some of those local assistance funds would have been available to support the courts.

As the third, independent branch of government, it is crucial that the courts operate efficiently and without scandal. Otherwise they invite interference by the legislative branch, which holds the purse strings, and the executive branch, which has investigative powers.

Howle recommended:

Given the lapses in the Judicial Council’s oversight and the AOC’s decision making, we believe significant change is necessary to ensure that the State’s courts receive the critical funding they require to provide access to justice for all Californians. As such, we made numerous recommendations that we believe will improve operations, increase transparency, and ensure accountability within the judicial branch.

The latest critique comes in a new report, “Data Reliability,” by State Auditor Elaine M. Howle. Subtitle: “State Agencies’ Computer-Generated Data Varied in Their Completeness and Accuracy.” Some key sections:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), whose standards we follow, requires us to assess and report on the reliability of computer-processed information that we use to support our audit findings, conclusions, and recommendations….

Three assessemnts were made: “sufficiently reliable,” “not sufficiently reliable” and “undetermined reliability”:

In performing 53 data reliability assessments for State systems, we determined for the purposes of the audits that the data were sufficiently reliable in 19 assessments….

For 17 data reliability assessments, we concluded that the data were not sufficiently reliable….

For 17 data reliability assessments, we concluded that the data had undetermined reliability. 

So 36 percent were “sufficiently reliable.” And 64 percent were not.

Would the private sector be allowed to get away with that? If a business’ tax returns to the IRS were only 36 percent “sufficiently reliable,” the chief managers would end up in a federal klink. More:

For example, data from two California State University (CSU) systems were of undetermined reliability. We did not perform accuracy and completeness testing for CSU’s Common Financial System because the system contains summary-level data and we determined that it would not be cost-effective to trace this summary-level data back to the individual transactions that support the total. Likewise, we could not assess data reliability for CSU’s Common Management System by tracing to and from supporting documents because the system is primarily paperless. Alternatively, following GAO guidelines, we could have reviewed the adequacy of selected system controls to determine whether data were entered reliably. However, because it was cost prohibitive, we did not conduct these reviews.

So what we have here is basic government incompetence. The state general fund gets $110 billion of our tax dollars, but its data systems are basically unreliable. We have no idea how the money in government is spent, nor how effective it is at what it’s advertised to do.