That’s the bottom line of a story by Anita Kumar in The Washington Post coming out Saturday morning.
To paraphrase the late Everett Dirksen- $1.4 billion here, $1.4 billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Let me offer a moment of personal reflection here. In 2002-03, I had the opportunity to serve as the Executive Director of Governor Warner’s Commission on Efficiency and Effectiveness, often known as the Wilder Commission in deference to the former Governor who chaired the effort.
When the effort began, many individuals told me that the Commission really would not be able to find much to save because Virginia is a tightly run, well managed state. I didn’t know what we would conclude, but I generally agreed with the assessment because my experience with the people who managed Virginia state government had led me to believe that there were almost uniformly frugal and responsible individuals who were careful about spending the taxpayers’ dollars.
During the course of the next fifteen months, Wilder, business leaders such as Nigel Morris, Dubby Wynne, and Paul Hirschbiel, and Assembly folks such as Walter Stosch, the late Hunter Andrews and Michele McQuigg developed an approach that resulted in identifying billions of dollars in potential savings, economies that were real and not just made up.
They did this not by focusing on small instances of potential overspending, but by examining the broad business practices of the Commonwealth that were not shaped by individual managers. How did a state the size of Virginia use its purchasing clout to obtain the best contracts with suppliers? How did the Commonwealth manage its large statewide real estate portfolio? And how did the Commonwealth collect all the receivables, i.e. the money, that it was owed?
I remember very well how surprised Nigel Morris, the co-founder of Capital One, was when he learned that we did not have an organized and coordinated effort to collect the debts that were due the Commonwealth. The business leaders were bewildered by why a state, with all its powers of enforcement, couldn’t do a better job. My guess is that Kumar’s article will have a lot of legislators asking this question next week when they return to Rchmond.
One of the conclusions that the Wilder Commission reached that it is crucial to spend the time coordinating business practices efficiently at the front-end and not simply to rely on performance audits after these have been implemented.
This advice may be as timely today as it was seven years ago.
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