Saturday, November 14, 2009

A real waste of state resources

In his continuing vendetta against Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo's U.S. Senate campaign, Jacob Payne at the Page One Kentucky blog has been railing about Mongiardo's press office's habit of attaching PDF versions of the original Word document of press releases and media advisories to the e-mails. Last week Payne lamented this terrible waste of state resources, talking about the time and effort and electricity required to create the PDF file and attach it to the e-mail message.

That's laughable. The amount of time and energy that requires is miniscule.

A real waste of state resources is coming from the way Frankfort sends unemployment checks.

Earlier in the year, the federal government funded a supplemental unemployment benefit giving each recipient an extra $25 per week. Seems it would be a simple matter to just add the money to the regular check and be done with it.

But no. Nothing Frankfort does is as simple or easy as it should be. Each unemployment recipient gets two checks mailed to them every two weeks. One check contains the normal benefit. The second check contains the extra $50 for the two weeks, minus any taxes that are withheld.

This strikes us as a monumental waste of money and resources. The state prints two checks and mails them separately, incurring two separate postage charges. This doubles the amount of money it takes to put the unemployment funds in the hands of the recipients. Even if the regular and supplemental benefits come from two accounts, seems like it would be a simple matter to pool those funds and keep track of them administratively instead of having to print and mail two separate checks.

If Frankfort is hurting for money so badly that most state agencies are being told to prepare for 6 percent cuts, it seems to us that a very simple way to recover some costs is to quit mailing two checks when one combined check, at half the cost, would do.

1 Comments:

At 3:08 PM, November 22, 2009, Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is so much truth in this article, can't understand why its not attracting any comments. Hitting too close to home for many?

 

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