One of my strategies for balancing the Texas budget is to examine every outsourcing contract for its efficiency. It’s NOT that I am against outsourcing state functions because 90% of the time, private companies can do a much more efficient and cost effective job than State Government BUT…it’s merely good business to evaluate those to see if we are getting what YOU, the taxpayers, are paying for! I’ve been doing some research on this and much to my surprise and dismay the State of Texas does very little (or almost nothing) in the way of oversight and evaluation of these contracts. Florida has an agency, The Council on Efficient Government that tracks all the state’s outsourcing contracts AND provides a cost-benefit analysis for each.
Yes, we have the Texas Council on Competitive Government but it currently only oversees 5 (that’s right ONLY FIVE) of the thousands of outsourcing contracts. Texas has had its share of “boondoggles” that have cost YOU money–Accenture LLP involved w/HHS, a nameless Spanish company that was to oversee the TransTexas corridor, Evercare of North Texas that was supposed to provide care for the chronically ill elderly AND didn’t and we were paying them $1.8 MILLION per month–how many more of these inefficient contracts are out there and we don’t know about?
We need more efficient ways of monitoring these contracts–I would like to have an agency or committee created to do JUST that!
Everyone is for more EFFICIENT government aren’t they?
This would be a first step!
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