Carter Wrenn posted on March 01, 2013 17:06
It’s a fault of human nature: When you spend your own money you look at it one way but when you spend someone else’s money it’s a different story.
Once, years ago, I served on a church-school board with a half dozen tight-fisted, hard-eyed businessmen who could squeeze a dollar out of a turnip. But whenever we’d start discussing raises for principals or teachers those tight fisted businessmen would turn to soft-hearted marshmallows.
Now in government no one spends their own money. And in state government, sometimes, they don’t even spend state government’s money – they spend Washington’s money. The State Medicaid Department is an example: It spends billions of dollars that come down from Washington each year.
Angie Sligh who heads the Department’s massive computer system that processes Medicaid claims has a tough job and a decade ago, when the department set out to replace its old computers, it got tougher. The conversion fell flat on its face. The state had to go back to the drawing board and start over. Then, a few years, later Mrs. Sligh found herself in another tough spot: She had to go over to the General Assembly and explain to a committee of irate legislators why the department’s new $250 million dollar computer system was $200 million dollars over budget and two years behind schedule. During the hearing, one irate legislator asked Mrs. Sligh how she’d rate her job performance and she explained why she’d give herself an ‘A’ – the legislators were skeptical but her bosses in the Perdue Administration agreed. The state auditor reports over the last three years they paid her $237,000 for working overtime and, just before Governor Perdue left office, gave her a 25% raise.
Now the department says the new computer system will be up and running by July 1st but the newspapers have reported another odd fact: The state’s new computer system runs on a thirty-year-old technology called COBOL.
It’s a classic example of how government works: Would someone spend $450 million of their own money to build a state-of-the-art computer system that runs on technology that was invented before the Internet?