“The owner of the Castro Valley care home where residents were all but abandoned after the state shut it down obtained her operating license even after government inspectors found she had put patients in ‘imminent jeopardy’ at nursing homes she used to run, records show.

“A spokesman for the state agency that granted the license conceded that officials hadn’t checked into Herminigilda ‘Hilda’ Manuel‘s history of running nursing homes before clearing her to operate the Castro Valley assisted-living center in 2008. Nine years earlier, federal officials ordered Manuel to pay more than $800,000 after inspectors found a long list of problems at her nursing homes, including staffers’ practice of tying patients to their beds without good cause.

“Such cross-checks of records are ‘not something currently being done on a regular basis,’ said Michael Weston, spokesman for the California Department of Social Services.

“Unlike assisted-living homes, nursing homes provide medical care. The two that Manuel owned received Medicare payments, so federal officials entrusted the state Department of Health Services to inspect for problems.

“Starting in 1998, the inspectors found numerous violations of federal rules at the Wisteria Care Center in Castro Valley and the Milpitas Care Center, both of which Manuel had run since 1994, state records show.”

A culture of complacency and indifference

The contrast with the private sector could not be more striking. Yes, of course, every year bad companies screw up and go out of business. But in the big picture, U.S. productivity keeps improving year after year after year, primarily due to the information-technology revolution but also due to the related rise of “big data” modeling. The emphasis on MBA-driven “best practices” also continues to spread from industry to industry. (Look at the Red Sox’ mini-dynasty; thanks to a brilliant billionaire owner, they’re a big-data/best-practices “Moneyball” team with money.)

In the government sector, automatic “step” pay raises, pensions and great job security make workers want to preserve the status quo, not shake it up.

Given the amazing frequency of stories about information-technology debacles involving government — here’s California’s latest — I wonder when someone will take a hard look at the possibility of passive-aggressive sabotage by implementers. Like the Luddites, they worry about losing their jobs.

There’s one more contrast between the public and private sector that’s worth noting: the utter lack of ethics and safeguards in government finance. The shady collapse of the tech and housing bubbles have produced a wave of regulation of Wall Street. But things are done routinely in California’s government that would generate prison time and SEC probes in the private sector.

On high-speed rail, the evidence is circumstantial but strong that the staff of the California High-Speed Rail Authority knew before the November 2008 state vote authorizing $9.95 billion in bonds for the project that the project didn’t have a legal business plan because the state couldn’t legally offer revenue guarantees to entice investors. Imagine what would happen if a corporation sold bonds without disclosing something like that.

On pensions, even as the tsunami hits, the leaders of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System constantly assert there is no pension crisis, or that it is deeply exaggerated. This even though it’s been four years since CalPERS’ then-actuary Ron Seeling warned that the agency’s status quo was unsustainable. Imagine what would happen if a corporation made such blatant misrepresentations about its financial health.

What will get the blame? Knowing CA’s media …

But this latest incompetence scandal, out of Castro Valley, already has a predictable arc. Instead of yielding stories about pervasive incompetence and corner-cutting in state government, we’re likely to see journalists lapping up the self-serving spin of government agencies. So the debacle will be blamed on … budget cuts.

Sigh.

Does Timm bother to consider the possibility that this is sequester theater — another attempt by the Obama administration to make tiny cuts in overall federal spending hurt to build pressure on Congress to raise taxes? Does he consider the angle that the Army Corps could have made cuts elsewhere?

Nah. He’s got his glib, easy thesis and he’s sticking to it. Meanwhile, the Hill newspaper offers insight into why an agency that has a budget that has gone up may struggle to pay for things it used to handle:

“President Obama proposed a one percent pay increase for federal workers and military employees in a pair of letters to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) sent Friday afternoon. …

“In a statement earlier this year, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Obama’s push for a pay increase was ‘not necessary to retain talented employees and just wastes taxpayer money.’

“’Federal employees have continued to receive promotions and within-grade pay increases over the past few years of the supposed ‘pay freeze,’ and voluntary separations from the federal government are near all-time lows,’ Issa said.”

Issa, a Vista entrepreneur and the most successful businessman in Congress, frames the issue in exactly correct fashion: If present compensation is so generous that federal employees almost never seek greener pastures, then pay and benefits are obviously perfectly adequate. Not only shouldn’t they be increased, maybe they should be cut.

But in Washington, as in Sacramento, such logic prompts expressions of horror from unions. Why? Because government’s primary role isn’t to provide services to the public. It’s to provide really good jobs. They’re not mad at Issa. They’re mad at Obama.

“Instead of holding to its promise to protect the middle class and the working poor, the administration seems determined to contribute to a worsening of living standards for federal workers, disabled veterans, and the elderly,”  American Federal of Government Employees president J. David Cox Sr. told the Alabama Media Group.

The common-sense observations of Issa remind me of one of my many gripes with how reporters cover government: They don’t see obvious issues that are right in front of them. If upper management benefits from the same sort of automatic “step” pay increases as the rank-and-file, that’s a huge conflict of interest that leads to pay hikes. Duh. But do you ever see this mentioned in coverage of government pay negotiations? Never.

There’s also this avenue of ignorance: We continue to witness a productivity revolution in the private sector driven by information technology that began two decades ago and is still transforming industries, white collar and blue collar alike. Shouldn’t this bleed over into the public sector? Of course. The respected McKinsey consulting group has been making this point for nearly a decade.

“The opportunity to improve government productivity is huge … [with] three classic management tools . . . organizational redesign, strategic procurement and operational redesign.”

 But do journalists ever bring this up? Nope. Duh.