Thanks to a new law, state agencies must file performance reports when they contract with a company. However, the reports are an administrative hassle that don't result in much, if any, state action, Ed Armstrong, administrator of the Office of State Procurement, told lawmakers Tuesday.
He said the state should do something to help all the paperwork serve a purpose. The reports do "have potential," he told the legislative Joint Performance Review panel.
"I can visualize these becoming useful instruments, but right now there's not a structure in place to necessarily do a lot with them that we couldn't do before," Armstrong said. "It's generating a lot of forms, but right now it's not being utilized in a way that's necessarily helping the agencies very much or the public very much."
He added that not all agencies are filing reports in accordance with the law. Armstrong, whose office is in the Department of Finance and Administration, was reporting on the effect of the new law. Joint Performance Review conducts investigations into the operations of state government.
Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana, who sponsored the Act 557 of the 2015 regular session, said lawmakers passed the bill to save money.
"The reason we changed procurement law was because of the amount of money we lost because we weren't doing vendor performance" reports, he said during the meeting.
Hickey said he remembered the bill putting stiff penalties in place for those who don't follow the procurement law.
"It criminalizes failure to comply," Armstrong said. "That is definitely a harsh penalty. In fact, it might work against its enforcement because it's so harsh, you would have to take your case to a prosecutor and get them to criminally prosecute someone for not filing this vendor performance report."
A fine might work better, he said, whereas criminal prosecution might seem like a remote possibility to agency leaders.
Hickey said he didn't know whether lawmakers would want to change the criminal aspect of the law, but administrative fines might make sense as an additional sanction.
Rep. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, a co-sponsor of the bill and Joint Performance Review co-chairman, said the law has put state agencies on alert.
"I think the law itself has served a valuable purpose given the change in culture and attitude around the Capitol among the agencies," he said. "It's not the way we used to do business. It's a new day. We want that transparency -- to see the vendors that are bad actors."
However, Armstrong said the reports would be more useful if they were easily accessible to the public.
"We could have a dashboard that any member of this body or any citizen of Arkansas could then go online and look up a vendor performance report. They could type in a vendor, and find out the details of the contract, pull up the contract, the contract documents," Armstrong said. "We're looking at an integrated system, trying to figure out what the cost would be and what efficiencies we could gain, but we could certainly gain in transparency and clarity."
Metro on 07/27/2016