Easy Money

I have been following the credit card “scandal” with great interest but little shock. My only comment is that I am surprised anyone is surprised by this. What we are witnessing is the natural behaviour of a human being granted access to somebody else’s money. Although some limits might be placed on the expenditure by “rules”, the reality is that it is the natural inclination of people to be fast and loose with unearned money.

The credit card “scandal” is not really a scandal but a perfect illustration of the squalid fate of taxpayer’s money. It is not the private use of public money, as egregious as that is. It is not even the nauseating sense of entitlement and privilege in the excuses we have heard to date. It is the acceptance of inadequate accountability.

Tracy Watkins points out in her article yesterday that:

“The checks and balances that apply to ministerial spending are actually quite robust compared with those that apply to spending under the cloak of the Parliamentary Service – the body which administers MPs’ travel and accommodation expenses and doles out largesse in the form of about $41 million in state funding to political parties each year.”

If Tracy finds Parliamentary Services accountability, with its $41 million budget, scary, she should try the frightening lack of accountability in almost every aspect of the public service and especially in the services administering welfare.

The problem is that all these “checks and balances”, that the public service purports to have, are created by public servants – often the same ones who will then be handling the money. Essentially, this means that the public service demands money from us (via the IRD), determines what it will spend it on (via parliament) and the determines how accountable it will be with this unearned money. Why we then evince surprise when hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars disappear into black holes that make no difference in our lives, is a mystery to me.

I am not saying here that public servants are stealing from us. I am not even saying that they are troughing (though they undoubtably are). I am saying that allowing public servants to determine what is suitable accountability is like having the village burglar designing your bank’s alarm system. The alarm may still work – just not when you need it.

A good concrete illustration would be the millions of dollars spent on quit smoking campaigns. The public service will approach accountability like this: There will be a number of tenders each containing a list of “deliverables”. All of the deliverables will be set up in terms of actions like “set up a committee to determine the feasibility of using public health nurses to deliver an anti-smoking message” or ” set up a system to ensure an outpatient is offered the quit smoking service”. No attempt will be made to determine whether these interventions will be useful in reducing smoking. At some point the public service will commission a survey to determine whether the rate of smoking has dropped. If it has, they will then continue to do the same thing, regardless of whether it can be shown that none of their interventions has made this difference. If the rate of smoking has not dropped, they may drop some things and try something else, without ever ascertaining whether any of their interventions were working. Or they may continue to spend public money in the vain hope that “it’s too early to tell” whether the interventions have been a success (a line certainly fed to them by the beneficiaries of state tenders)

What is never asked is:

• Do the majority of taxpayers see this intervention as being worthwhile?
• Is any one particular intervention actually achieving the desired outcome?
• Is this outcome actually achievable using these interventions?
• Should this work be done by government? Is it not more soluble as a private or a community initiative?

It is this last question that strikes fear into the heart of public servants the world over. In terms of smoking, all the evidence points to this being much better tackled as a community initiative. Typically communities (who have to raise money voluntarily) and private business (who have to produce it) are far more careful with the use of money than governments. There are, of course, spectacular exceptions to this.

Public servants have no real imperative to find actual solutions, only to be seen to be looking for them. Thus accountability for public money has little to do with results and everything to do with “services”. These may be services that have no use or meaning for us, but they are being delivered – whether we want them or not. It is this disconnect, between what the public really want and what they actually get for their money, that shows up the public accountability charade for what it really is – a set of rules to add legitimacy to an action that has no real legitimacy.

Witness the debacle of Bill English’s double dipping. Technically, English did absolutely nothing wrong – according to the rules laid out. But few of us think that claiming a home you rarely live in as your official residence, in order to claim the ministerial housing allowance, is a fair or honest thing to do. The accountability rules were clearly not designed to protect the taxpayer, but benefit the politician and the public servant. The rules are there so that public servants can claim legitimacy for their spending, not so we, the public, can see that this is money well-spent.

All the credit card spending means it that, in terms of the government, the words Quality Spending should always invoke howls of derisive laughter…

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