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The Massachusetts state auditor’s office is well-known for its work in utilizing sophisticated data analysis to uncover public benefit fraud. This work is continuing, but the office has focused lately on several other aspects of the social service safety net that relate much more to the quality of services. A key issue is access to service. As auditor Suzanne Bump said last fall, “It is essential that these programs operate with integrity. That means fighting abuse and fraud, but it also requires that we work to identify the barriers that prohibit Massachusetts residents from accessing benefits for which they are eligible.” The first of several planned audits on barriers to access came out last month and focused on the Catastrophic Illness in Children Relief Fund, which helped 500 families with about $5.4 million in assistance between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2015, the period covered by the audit. The program is designed to help families deal with seriously ill children who have expenses that aren’t covered or have been denied by health insurance. These medical expenses may include hotel stays for medical visits far from home or costs for equipment, medication, or home/car modifications. Bump said the audit showed the program is doing “the good work it was intended to do.” But, as with so many excellent public policy ideas, there are some aspects of implementation that fall short. The audit found that families, on average wait 289 days from the time they apply to application approval. During most of this period, applications “sat idle” waiting to be assigned to staff. Only when a staff assignment was made were applicants informed that additional financial or other information was needed. “Families of children with catastrophic illness face immense financial and emotional hardship,” auditor Bump said. “Our audit found that long delays in application processing is unnecessarily extending this financial and emotional burden.” The auditor’s office looked at the timing for processing applications in six other states that had similar programs. It found that Alaska, Idaho, Virginia and West Virginia processed applications in one to three months. New Jersey and New Mexico fell in a range more similar to Massachusetts, between 8 and 11 months.

As journalists, we don’t get squadrons of letters complaining about the things we’ve written. The fact that we don’t write about politics probably helps a lot (by definition, any political reporter is susceptible to attack by people who disagree — even if the article he or she has written is 100% based on accurate information and solid quotes). Still, it’s the nature of the game that journalists who publish to a wide audience are going to hear back from time to time from that audience — sometimes simply to correct a genuine error, sometimes to dispute the thesis of the piece, sometimes because there’s a desire to vent. It has long been a pet peeve of ours, that said, that many note writers (now, mostly communicating by e-mail) feel some kind of need (go ask Freud) to be vituperative in tone, whether or not they have a reasonable dispute with the journalist. Many a note begins with words like: “It’s unfathomable to me that you call yourself a journalist even though you clearly have no grasp of the topic about which you recently wrote, and have no respect for the facts.” With the expansion of media outlets, there may well be people writing who really have no respect for the facts. But we think they are few and far between. And that group doesn’t include us. Why be rude? It doesn’t do anyone any good. It doesn’t make it more likely to get a retraction, an apology or even a civil letter in return. So, rule number one is the same rule as we’d like to see governing the world: Be civil. That will get you more attention, and ultimately, more satisfaction.  Maybe you can persuade the journalist that there’s another side to the story told, and he or she will write a follow-up piece. We’ll never forget the note that Rich got some years ago suggesting that the writer hoped that his mother would be hit by a Mack Truck.  The combination of outright hostility and specificity was jarring, and went far enough that he never wrote back. A few other rules of thumb: Be clear as to what the errors you’re complaining about actually are. Indicating that “this article was so riddled with errors that I can’t believe it,” doesn’t even give a journalist the opportunity to provide a defense or admit failure. And if you can’t really cite a specific error, but just disagree with the conclusions of the piece, then say that. Tell the journalist exactly what you want. Are you looking for a retraction, or just to help the writer get things righter in the future? Try to avoid getting the journalist’s name wrong.  This is just silly. But you’d be surprised how many notes we get addressed to Mr. Barrett and Ms. Greene, when in fact our genders are the other way around. Unless there’s a good reason not to do so, let the author know who you are, beyond your name. This has become more of an issue since e-mail became ubiquitous. People sign off with a first name, and don’t give the writer any idea what kind of mindset they may have, given their job. (Of course, everyone who takes the time to write deserves equal respect — whether it’s a 12-year-old fulfilling a school assignment to write a letter to a journalist or the governor of a state.) Try not to sound like a lawyer, unless you are a lawyer. Be clear as to whether you’re writing in order to let the writer know about an error, or to dispute the conclusions. In our case, we’ve gotten far more of the latter group than the former, and — given the opportunity — will reach out to the correspondent to talk things over. Some of these conversations have actually resulted in long-standing, positive relationships.

We’ve written lately about the emotional side of some of the toughest jobs in government. Police officers, firefighters, emergency workers and corrections employees must find a way to deal with the ongoing stress – and inevitable tragedy — that is an integral part of their work life. Mary Guy, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Public Affairs has been studying the impact of “emotional labor” for many years. She wrote to us following our July 7th Governing column to ask us to focus more on the topic. “It deserves attention, not only from the negative side, but also from its positive side. Many public service jobs are emotionally intense — much more so than private sector jobs. People usually come to government for services on the worst day of the worst week of the worst month of their lives.” We called Prof. Guy to hear more. Over the years, she’s had dozens of conversations with government workers in emotionally intense jobs. The workers she has interviewed include dispatchers, people who are handling call lines, social workers, teachers, mental health workers, domestic violence workers and countless other individuals whose jobs entail as much of an emotional component as a cognitive one. Many of these jobs require people to cover up their own emotions, to wear a mask of sorts, in order to handle the situations they confront. “It’s the public information officer who has to give factual information while standing in front of a scene of devastation,” she says. “It’s a 911 call taker who has to deal with a hysterical child on the phone or has to control her own emotions when she hears someone screaming.” The qualities that help individuals successfully handle emotional labor “are never listed in any job description,” says Guy. “They don’t get rewarded in the annual performance appraisal.” One of the most important qualities is “emotive self awareness,” she says. One manager she spoke with in a victim’s assistance agency, for example, will always ask a job candidate how he or she has handled anger or emotional upset at a previous job. If someone denies ever feeling angry or emotionally affected, they don’t get the job. “Workers who are more aware of their own emotive state have less burnout than people who are not aware,” says Guy. “Developing awareness of how one feels and being able to articulate that and talk about that, significantly diminishes the degree to which burnout is going to happen.” An important part of handling emotional labor is talking about it – for example, in weekly sessions in which workers can share their experiences with peers who understand. This kind of emotional safety valve is more common in women-dominated settings, such as a domestic violence shelter. “Police try to do this, but it isn’t integrated as a norm. It’s treated as someone having a problem and it has to be treated as normal.” Guy emphasizes that jobs with a high emotional labor component also can be the most rewarding. “It has a downside, but it also has a tremendous upside in contributing to job satisfaction. They know their work matters. They know they’re making a difference.” If you’d like to read more about emotional labor in the public sector, Prof. Guy has co-authored two books on the topic as well as numerous journal articles. The books are: Emotional Labor and Crisis Response: Working on the Razor’s Edge by Sharon H. Mastracci, Mary E. Guy & Meredith A. Newman, 2011 Emotional Labor: Putting the Service in Public Service by Mary E. Guy, Meredith A. Newman & Sharon H. Mastracci, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote a column for Governing magazine that focused on the mental health issues that are all-to-often confronted by the men and women who perform some of the toughest tasks in America’s cities, counties and states: police officers, firefighters, emergency workers and correctional officers. We recommend that you take a look at the Governing piece, but thought that you might find some of the highlights we found about the topic in our research to be of interest. Six follow here: Over the course of the last couple of years, more firefighters died in suicides than they did actually fighting fires. In some cases, workers who take these dangerous jobs work long, intense hours — sometimes as much as 48 hours shifts (although they do get interrupted sleep time during those shifts. There can be a reluctance for stressed employees to speak up, for fear that such vulnerability to normal human reactions could conceivably put their job at risk. There’s a minimal amount of rigorous work on what works to counteract stresses. Recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and suicide risk in the military has influenced the recognition of similar problems for public sector employees exposed to violence and traumatic events. But government-run programs to respond to PTSD and other mental health problems have generally not caught up to needs. Non-governmental organizations such as the Code Green Campaign, which offers peer counseling and other support services to firefighters and emergency medical service workers, and the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance, provide much-needed help and research. Some enlightened communities are trying to take better care of these invaluable employees’ mental health. As the Governing piece related, “in Stockton, Calif., police learn to talk about their feelings and are encouraged to seek peer support or see therapists as part of the department’s wellness program and Phoenix is often cited for its “Friends Helping Friends” program, which offers firefighters counseling and resources to deal with issues like drug and alcohol abuse, depression, family problems and stress.

An ASPA webinar in partnership with the Center for Accountability and Performance is being held at 1 p.m. ET on Wednesday July 26. The topic is “bad data,” and the ways it impacts the smooth functioning of states and localities. Wednesday, July 26 1 p.m. ET Collecting data is very important to most government agencies and nonprofit institutions, but it must be quality data or there’s little utility for it. Join us for this webinar, which will delve into the ins and outs of flawed information. Katherine will be a panelist, and Rich will be moderating (as you’ll see below). With a growing emphasis on the use of data to effectively and efficiently run government, its quality is critical. All too frequently, the information used is out of date, inaccurate, incompatible, siloed, difficult to use and confusing. This panel will delve into the reasons data can be problematic, the ramifications and the reasons this issue is of paramount importance. This B&G Report item is especially aimed at members of ASPA, as they can sign up for free. For others, it’s a $75 fee. Presenters: Katherine Barrett, Partner, Barrett and Greene Inc. Stefaan G. Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer, Governance Laboratory, New York University Ben Ward, Manager, Information Technology Audits Unit, California State Auditor’s Office Richard Greene, Moderator, Partner, Barrett and Greene Inc. To register please click here.

In 2017, Virginia became the first state to pass legislation allowing delivery robots to travel autonomously on its streets.. The legislation went into effect July 1 and you can read about it in this article by April Glaser in recode.net. With this information in mind, we decided to begin a series of fanciful animated features about state and locality firsts, scintillating facts and off-beat state and local information in our B&G blog, utilizing the skills of our son Ben Greene. They’ll follow. Please share on social media. (After the passage of the Virginia legislation, Idaho, Wisconsin and Florida became the second, third and fourth states to take similar action.)

Just last Friday, at the annual meeting of the National Governors Association, Minnesota’s Governor Mark Dayton added his state’s name to 37 others in targeting cybersecurity a top priority, according to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The article pointed out that Minnesota “state agencies fend off approximately 3 million cyberattacks daily.” Minnesota’s pledge involved signing up to “A Compact to Improve Cybersecurity.” The compact, reported the Tribune involvement an agreement to “develop or build upon statewide plans to combat cyberattacks against IT networks and to protect both personal and government data shared on state systems.” According to statescoop, this was the culmination, though not the conclusion of “a yearlong initiative spearheaded by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, the National Governors Association’s outgoing chair. As McAuliffe stated in a press release, “The goal of my initiative as NGA chair was to elevate the importance of cybersecurity on every governor’s agenda. To do that, we had to highlight why cybersecurity was more than just an information technology issue. I am proud that, throughout the last year, we have successfully engaged governors and their states on strengthening their cyber protocols and recognizing that cybersecurity is a technology issue, but it’s also a health issue, an education issue, a public safety issue, an economic issue and a democracy issue.” All of this sounds like good news to us. For a long while, we’ve been writing articles citing cybersecurity as one of the biggest issues confronting the states. In fact, we’ve repeatedly complained that people view state’s efforts to control cyber attacks as exclusively an issue of privacy — when we fear that a major breach could cost lives and millions of dollars. But even with the progress made at the NGA session, a question still stands in our minds: Why haven’t the other 13 states joined in?

A new audit from Washington’s King County sheds light on the adverse non-monetary impact of too much overtime. The audit looks at Sheriff’s Office overtime, concluding that both safety and performance can be compromised when individual officers work too many hours.  According to the audit, while overtime may be less expensive than hiring more officers, it can have “negative impacts on officer health, policing performance and community safety.” We wrote a bit about the overtime safety issue in a Governing column in May, 2016,  “Overtime: The Good, the Bad and the Unsafe.” But the information we found on the safety impact of excessive overtime was largely anecdotal. This recent audit includes data analysis that dramatically highlights safety and performance problems.  Auditors found that fatigue increased accident risk, impaired decision making and adversely affected hand-eye coordination. It also contributed to health problems. The chart above was created by the King County Auditor’s Office, based on a PeopleSoft analysis of King County Sheriff Officer hours, as well as additional information about off-duty hours worked during the 2014-2016 period. While it shows the risk of adverse events is still low, the chance of problems goes up as more overtime is worked. Four hours of additional overtime in a week increases the chance of “negative incidents,” including accidents, ethics violations, use of force or professional complaints by 12 percent, according to the audit. One of the problems in King County is that overtime is not distributed evenly. As is common generally,  some employees choose to work far more overtime than others. The audit makes a strong case that  disproportionate levels of overtime increase departmental risk.  Sheriff Department officers who work an average of  18 hours of overtime are 25 percent more likely to have “negative performance incidents” than those who work 10 hours of overtime per week.  For those especially high overtime users (about 1 percent of officers)  the chance of safety incidents goes up 17 percent. The King County audit makes a number of recommendations to improve the situation. It advises instituting limits on overtime, similar to those in other jurisdictions such as Los Angeles County. It also suggests that scheduling changes and the development of new staffing models could help reduce the need for overtime. One other recommendation focuses on off-duty private security work by sheriff’s office employees. While the audit cites several other entities that track off-duty hours worked, the King County Sheriff’s Office does not currently do this. Since off-duty hours of work can also contribute to fatigue, the audit recommends putting in place a system that monitors total hours of work, not just work for the county.

Several years ago, we started work on a project about state contracts. The idea was to utilize the contract databases that the ten biggest states were putting up on much-heralded transparency websites to analyze trends in state contracts. This turned out to be a highly complex and frustrating task. We never were able to finish. Contract data was entered inconsistently. Contract information lacked timeliness and was often incomplete. Many data fields were blank. Our effort to analyze the information from databases of state contracts ended in early 2014. We’re sure there have been improvements since then and we’d love to try again. But a June 2017 audit by the California State Auditor provides a warning that we would run into similar obstacles today. Looking at the Department of General Services and the California Department of Technology, the audit found countless problems. In a letter to the Governor and legislative leaders, auditor Elaine Howle wrote:  “General services did not ensure the integrity of the data in the database it created to track the State’s contracts. As a result of its lack of oversight, the database contained numerous errors, essentially rendering it ineffective for its intended purpose.” Yesterday, we talked with Howle about the audit. She knows there’s enormous potential to learn more about the state’s contracting decisions by analyzing state data. “But if the data going in is bad, no matter how you analyze it, it’s going to give you bad information.” Poor data quality is a constant headache for her office and just about every other state audit and evaluation office, as we chronicled in the Causes, Costs and Consequences of Bad Government Data, our July 2015 cover story in Governing magazine.  The California State Auditor’s office has focused on this issue to such an extent that every two years, it releases a data reliability report, which summarizes the data problems it has found in multiple audits. In talking with Howle, several issues stood out relating to the contract database audit. The audit found that agencies were often entering data into the system incorrectly and inconsistently. Multiple contracts and contract amendments were missing from the database. Contracts were also identified as competitively bid, when they weren’t. For example, the Department of Motor Vehicles listed a $34 million contract as competitively bid. When auditors looked more closely, only the original $3 million contract was competitively bid. The original contract was subsequently amended “nine times, without competition,” increasing its value to $34 million. The audit covered database issues that occurred between July 2011 and December 2015. In January 2016, the General Services department began transitioning to an expensive new database, but Howle is troubled that many of the same data quality problems remain.  “We’re very worried about the problems continuing with the new system,” she told us. Currently, agency personnel still lack training that would help improve the data inputting process. Information is still inconsistent. In addition, the new database, like the old one, lacks comprehensible easy to access information on contract amendments. The conclusion of the audit and its recommendations centered on the need for far more oversight of data quality by both General Services and the Department of Technology, greater attention to the analysis of the data, and heightened enforcement of rules to prevent unnecessary use of non-competitive contracts.

We’ve had the good fortune, for some time now, of working with the Volcker Alliance on a series of projects and reports. The current effort involves a massive fifty-state analysis of practices of state budgets, and we thought Barrett and Greene, Inc. readers would benefit from hearing all about it. Bill Glasgall who spearheads the project was kind enough to write the following essay for us. Thanks, Bill. By William Glasgall If you want to investigate the practices of all fifty US state budgets, what better way to do it than fan out across the country to do the research? That is the modus operandi of the Volcker Alliance’s Truth and Integrity in Government Finance Project, which is relying on a network of public finance professors and graduate students at eleven public administration and policy schools from New York to California to dig into a mountain of fiscal documents to help answer the question, “What, truly, is a balanced budget?” That answer is critical because while forty-nine states require balanced budgets by law, and the lone holdout, Vermont, follows its peers’ example, how revenues and expenditures are mixed and matched can vary widely from state to state and year to year. In asking a common set of questions about the states’ budgeting practices, the researchers are highlighting which states use one-time revenue items to achieve balance; the state of pension funding and its relationship to annual or biennial budgets; whether and how states forecast long-term financial trends; and how transparent is each state’s budget process. The work follows the Alliance’s 2015 publication of Truth and Integrity in State Budgeting: Lessons from Three States, written by special project consultants Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene, as well as subsequent papers by the duo covering budget transparency and budget information sources for policymakers and civic groups, taxpayers, and the media. In early June, Barrett and Greene joined Volcker Alliance Chairman Paul A. Volcker, President Tom Ross, Director Richard Ravitch Matt Fabian, project consultant with Municipal Market Analytics Inc., and the Alliance’s state and local team to meet in New York with academics from the eleven schools to discuss progress on the Truth and Integrity project. A full report on the research is planned for later in 2017, and preliminary findings recently appeared in the Bond Buyer newspaper. Among the findings in fiscal 2016: • Half of the states failed to make contributions to public employee pension systems that the plans’ actuaries recommended. • About 20 percent of states filled budget gaps with proceeds of asset sales, upfront payments on financings, or other financial transactions. • Seven states borrowed funds to close budget deficits, while 17 shifted current-year costs to future years. • Only a handful of states fully disclosed the cost of deferred infrastructure maintenance.

We’re taking this week off, but wanted to alert you to our Second Quarter Blog Subject Guide.  This document lists our blog posts under topic headings so that readers with particular interests can find what they’re looking for. The Second quarter guide covers the period from April 1 to June 30th, 2017. Our First Quarter Blog Subject Guide covered our posts between January 4 (when we launched this website) until March 31. You can also find both guides in the Resources section of our website. We’ll be back in action on Tuesday of next week.

We’ve written a lot about citizen distrust of government, which we abundantly believe is a bad thing. On the other hand, introspectively, we’re aware that we may be as much a part of the disease as we are of the cure. For example, we lean heavily on performance audits for the news we cover — but it’s rare that we give much attention to audits that say everything is swell. Instead we,  like many government observers, tend to focus on the audits that point out aspects of government that are flawed. Here’s our excuse: We have not figured out a good way to report on government audits that find little wrong and still convince readers to click through to see the details. It’s the old man bites dog/dog bites man issue.  Some skeptics refer to this phenomenon with the mantra, “You lead with what bleeds.” And we’re not the worst, by any means. When it comes to local newspaper, TV, Internet or radio coverage not only are positive audits virtually ignored, one tiny negative can be plucked out and turned into a headline. We don’t do that. There is, however, something the auditors can do to help ameliorate this problem. Missouri’s audit office has a neat way of putting its audit results into context and that, we believe can be a big help. The Missouri system provides audit ratings, based on both the quantity and seriousness of the findings, as well as the efforts made to fix the problems. Audits are labeled poor, fair, good or excellent. A somewhat different rating system is in use by the Texas State Auditor’s Office, where individual findings are labeled on a low, medium or high scale (accompanied by colored dots). We have not noticed other examples. We visit lots of audit offices and believe this kind of system is quite rare. The Missouri rating system was designed before the current auditor, Nicole Galloway, took office in spring 2015, but she’s a big supporter of the practice. “I strongly believe in the rating system. It serves the citizens well,” she told us. “The sky is not falling with every audit report. Citizens would like the audit report to be put in context.  The rating system does that.” There is some subjectivity to the ratings, which are not formulaic. Sometimes an audit with a handful of minor findings could still get a good, while an audit with one major finding could be labeled fair. Auditors use their judgment. One advantage of the rating system is that entities with a lower rating have a chance to show improvement. Getting a “fair” rating is nothing to brag about, but if an agency is moving up from poor, it does show that improvements are in the works.  A poor rating also helps the audit office focus attention. “For every poor rating, we conduct a follow-up review. If there’s one hot-button issue in a ‘fair’ audit, we may do a follow up just on that,” Galloway said. One other advantage to the system: When Carroll County, Missouri got an excellent rating last year, the county’s audit was accompanied by a press release from the auditor’s office announcing “the first-ever excellent rating to a county” since the rating system started in 2011. (About 5 percent of audits, in general, receive excellent ratings.) The news was covered by stations KMMO and KMZU. Counties and elected officials celebrated with cake.