Updating the Indiana Law Blog entry from Monday on problems at state quasi-public agencies such as the Intelenet Commission and PERF, is this Indianapolis Star editorial published yesterday, August 31st, headlined "State Web scandal: a tangled mess" that concludes:
There is no excuse for state government not providing more oversight of the Web academy. And allegations that Scales signed over checks for himself for thousands of dollars and approved his own expense reports are unconscionable.Along with Intelenet, PERF, and the new Indiana Economic Development Commission (IEDC), the BMV Commission is also a kind of quasi-public agency. As I quoted from a Star story in this June 1, 2004 ILB entry:Kernan already has been heavily criticized for scandals that exposed criminal wrongdoing in the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration [FSSA], Bureau of Motor Vehicles [BMV] and Public Employees Retirement Fund [PERF]. It appears that the state bureaucracy has let him, and Indiana's taxpayers, down again.
The governor appoints bipartisan members to the commission, but they are not accountable to the governor or the General Assembly, said Dan Henkel, spokesman for the BMV. It is not clear whether the governor can legally remove a member from the commission. The law does not address that issue.The entry continues:Henkel maintains the commission was created to have some independence from the governor's office after years of political patronage in the agency. Some officials contend the state should eliminate the commission and make the governor's office directly responsible for the license branches.
Commission members are not accountable for their decisions, said state Rep. Ron Liggett, D-Redkey, who sat on a committee to reform the BMV in 2000. "There is no oversight," he said.
As I noted in a May 17, 2004 Indiana Law Blog entry about the new Indiana Economic Development Commission, both the BMVC and now the IEDC were established to remove their functions from the direct control of the Governor, and instead place them under the control of an "authority" insulated from the voters by layers of bureaucracy. To my mind, and as I wrote last month, that is not a good thing ...Interested readers are also referred to this June 3 entry quoting from a Star editorial of that date. Posted by Marcia Oddi at September 1, 2004 08:20 AM