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Reform and Renewal, Part 9,689 * UPDATED x1 *

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Illinois

* Management is such a high priority. Not…

A major state agency has been accused for the second time in three years of failing to protect sensitive information.

In a report released Thursday, Auditor General William Holland found the Illinois Department of Human Services didn’t properly secure employee and contractor records, potentially allowing easy access to Social Security numbers and other personal information.

The agency, which has more than 14,000 workers, was hit with a similar finding during a previous audit.

“It is abundantly clear that serious deficiencies in security administration have existed for the last two audit periods,” Holland wrote in his report. “While we agree that there are various methods of implementing security administration, it is clear the current approach is not working.”

Auditors found some documents simply by walking through agency offices and looking in or near trash and recycling bins.

Read the summary here and the full audit here.

* Patterson lists some of the problems on his blog…

The department opened its own bank accounts and, whoops, forgot to tell state officials.

The department didn’t have adequate procedures for disposing of confidential information.

The department didn’t keep adequate records on its vehicles.

But the one that stood out — especially since the department has problems getting rid of confidential information — was that taxpayers spent thousands on 39 “high capacity shredders” and, a year later, 22 of them had not been installed let alone put to use.

The department’s excuse is that some buildings lacked the electrical current needed for the shredders. In other cases, there simply wasn’t space for the shredders.

Those shredders were purchased after newspaper reports of the lax document security. All show, no go?

*** UPDATE *** Patterson has updated…

In response, department spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus called to say the electrical and space issues regarding the shredders have been resolved.

“It takes time, but all the shredders have been installed,” said

The department also disagrees with several of Holland’s audit findings.

posted by Rich Miller
Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 9:12 am

Comments

Um, don’t tell taxpayers (or the auditors) about Illinois agency hard drives turning up on ebay (with all data intact).

Shhhh.

Comment by Macbeth Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 9:19 am
this sounds just like the scanners they needed to help reduced lost paperwork. those are still sitting on a shelf somewhere probably next to the shredders.

Comment by southsider Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 9:23 am
From the summary===Testing of administrative contracts was performed at the Department’s Central Office in which we noted 6 of 30 contracts tested were not signed by all parties prior to the beginning date as set forth in the contract agreement. The average length of time between the beginning date of the contract and the final required signature was 62 days, with a range of 17 days to 167 days.
Department management stated contracts were not signed in a timely manner due to the Department’s internal process of preparing and approving all required forms, number of contracts processed by the Department, and the time it takes to approve a contract at the facility and route it through the Department.===
Just a bureaucratic issue? No….
===Failure to have the contract agreements signed before the beginning of the contract period does not bind the service provider for compliance with applicable laws, regulations and rules.===
Yikes! (this is the Central office!)

Comment by Vote Quimby! Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 9:38 am
Consider the track record we have seen, one would believe that this agency thinks other people’s money grows on trees.

As liberals claim that citizens are being abused by greedy corporations, they utterly fail to demonstrate that fleecing us to feed bureaucracies is a better approach to anything.

Give me freedom and a free market over Soviet-style government anyday.

Comment by VanillaMan Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 9:40 am
Doesn’t DHS also run the infamous Howe Developmental Center, which lost its federal certification a year ago and hasn’t regained it yet.

The facility costs about 60 million a year to run, and the feds used to pay half of it but now we Illinois taxpayer pay the whole 60 mill, with no end in sight.

More importantly, a coalition of disability advocate groups recently concluded, after multiple ineffectual efforts (by Blago appointees) at reform, that the place should be shut down.

Despite the fact that people may be actually dying because of the poor care, it’s unlikely that will happen. This is a major Blago/Emil pork farm, with hundreds of lush patronage “jobs” at stake and many millions in contracts. Illinois Democrats may care about the poor and disabled but only when it doesn’t interfere with patronage and “campaign contributions.”

Comment by Cassandra Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 9:50 am
Cassandra: It is not just Blao appointees who have being trying to reform the place, Edgar and Ryan tried too.

Comment by Give Me A Break Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 9:57 am
DHS is a mega-agency. It would be more efficient to service delivery if it were dis-sasembled back into the legacy organizations. It seemed like a good idea when it was created but it has turned out to be a failed proposition.

Comment by A Citizen Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:03 am
GMAB-

Didn’t Ryan and Edgar at least manage to hold on to federal certificaiton? From what we know of the federal government, the standards can’t be that high.

Comment by Cassandra Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:09 am
It is a bit ironic that the agnecies under the Gov are constaily being blasted under FOIA for failing to turn over information on the operations of Government… But apparently they do not extend this secrecy and protection to private information of private individuals.

Comment by Ghost Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:25 am
Cassandra: They held onto their fed cert only after the ACLU and Equip for Equality threated both Edgar and Ryan with class-actions. I know Blago has issues, but please don’t act like Illinois had a cutting edge human service system before Blago took office. How many times did the ACLU sue DCFS and DMHDD under Saint Edgar?

Comment by Give Me A Break Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:29 am
Several of the audit findings can be explained by the fact that DHS went from 20,000 state employees to 15,000 state employees under the current administration. Thats a 25% drop in headcount. DHS has the same responsibilities with fewer employees to carry them out. This leads to inefficiencies, inaccuracies, sloppiness, etc.

Comment by Partial Explanation Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:32 am
VMan, liberalism or conservatism has nothing to do with it. We’re 5 1/2 years into an administration that has no experience, talent or interest in managing a $60 billion a year operation.

That’s why you see this stuff all the time. You put hacks in charge and demand no accountability. The professional administrators in government who can do the job are ignored, intimidated or rendered powerless.

Rod’s no liberal. He’s his own incredibly shrinking cult of personality with no roots in a political philosophy whatsoever. Was the Bush/Hastert/McConnell era in Washington conservative? In what sense of the word?

Comment by wordslinger Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:39 am
“this sounds just like the scanners they needed to help reduced lost paperwork. those are still sitting on a shelf somewhere probably next to the shredders.”

Just wait until they get them both up and running, with employees who can’t tell one from the other!

Comment by Anon Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:56 am
Quoting wordslinger ..”We’re 5 1/2 years into an administration that has no experience, talent or interest in managing a $60 billion a year operation.”

What happens when an inexperienced team gets to Washington and does to the Federal budget what an all Democratically controlled government has done to Illinois?

Comment by Plutocrat03 Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 11:49 am
No offense, Plutocrat03, but the federal Republicans have no credible legs to stand on when it comes to budget management.

Comment by Rich Miller Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 11:51 am
GMAB-
You’re right, but Blago and his coalition of wealthy liberals, African Americans, and Machine Democrats promised reform everywhere in state government, and they should be held to that. Particularly, with respect to DHS and DCFS clients, we taxpayers should be particularly demanding of Blago-installed management, because the stakes are so high for the clients. Howe clients can’t just move into another facility when things get bad. Mistreated kids can’t move in with new parents. They are stuck.

You just can’t defend this on the basis of “past practice.” But even if you believe that the Republicans are responsible, Blago has had more than five years to fix it. But things have gotten worse at Howe, evidently. With Blago and the Democrats, it’s all talk and no action. In Illinois anyway, Democrats in no way deserve the
label of defenders of the least powerful among us.

Comment by Cassandra Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 11:55 am
I don’t believe that they have done a good job either, but no one does a better job of diverting money away from its intended purpose than the Chicago/Illinois machine Democrats. (or in homage to Kass - the Illinois combine)

Comment by Plutocrat03 Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 11:56 am
Pluto, I also said:

==Was the Bush/Hastert/McConnell era in Washington conservative? In what sense of the word?==

They weren’t so great with the money when they ran the store.

Comment by wordslinger Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 11:58 am
These stories are getting to be about as common as “Dog bites Man” or “Feds subpoena Blago agency files.”

Time and again, our most competent Constitutional Officer, his strong staff and independent auditors, all no axes to grind find a State agency run less competently than the average 7-Eleven.

Where’s the outrage?

When does SOMEONE say “enough is enough?”

How can a General Assembly even consider handing $34 billion in new capital spending to this group when they can’t responsibly manage the basic accounting, contract management, and budgeting processes for the operating budget?

Comment by Arthur Andersen Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 1:14 pm
In our area of DHS, we were asked if we needed a shredder. Our supervisor agreed that we did and tried to order a “cross cut” shredder to insure that data could not be retrieved. DHS, instead ordered a whole bunch of “ribbon” shredders and distributed them. After using the shredders for a few days, they needed to be emptied. As we did so, we noticed that these “ribbon” shredders basically left lines of reports intact so each slice of report would have a full line of data that was easily read just as my supervisor had predicted. It was suggested that we return the shredders to the company in exchange for the type we needed. Upper management’s answer was that the company would not take them back and that we were not to use them, so now the shredders just sit here and take up space. We have a large commercial type shredder that is in a central location, but there is no one to run it most of the time or it is need of maintenance that we cannot afford so the stuff to be shredded just sits around in boxes stashed here and there.

Comment by Sweet Polly Purebred Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 1:31 pm
SPP….I said it before and I’ll say it again: Yikes!

I’ll bet they got a great deal on all the ribbon-style shredders….the kind nobody can use just for that reason. They probably threw in some 15″ monochrome computer monitors to seal the deal!

Comment by Vote Quimby! Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 1:57 pm
VQ - You are always so quick! Actually they threw in some of those new fangled high tech erasable monitors - the kind you just shake if you make a mistake, I think they are called Etch-A-Sketch’s?

Comment by Sweet Polly Purebred Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 2:06 pm
A Citizen Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 10:03 am:
Do Florida and Texas still have their super-agency concept, or did they finally scrap it?

Comment by Anonymous Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 3:30 pm
Anon - Florida scrapped their “Super DHS” just 2 years after it was created. They found that the agency was just so big that they could not maintain it. There were problems with keeping track of people, equipment, services, money, etc. I cannot speak to the Texas super agency.

Comment by Sweet Polly Purebred Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 3:35 pm
The folks at DHS are trying to do their jobs, but what we see when government takes over an ever-growing bureucracy is waste. Big government fleeces us worse than big business does. With big business, you have the choice of doing business with them. We don’t get that freedom when voters believe that big government can handle the job.

The more we mandate governments to do what we should be doing for ourselves, the more money we waste and the poorer the job.

We need smaller government and freedom of choice.

It doesn’t matter which party, either. A problem isn’t the sincerity or professionalism, a problem is in the belief that a government should be empowered to take our money and spend it to provide what we should be providing on our own.

We have too many voters instantly believing in obsolete management theory that centralizing decision making through a government body is an efficient way to provide societal needs. The proof is around us and it points out that the opposite is true.

This is no longer the industrial age where government is populated with WWII team building veterans offering a single flavor of a product or service.

Smaller, more efficient governments allows for better citizen control and more fiscal efficiencies. DHS continues to demonstrate why we shouldn’t be centralizing government services in the 21st Century, and why we need to modernize our thinking.

Comment by VanillaMan Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 3:36 pm
VM - As a DHS insider all I can say is AMEN!

Comment by Sweet Polly Purebred Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 3:48 pm
I also plead guilty to working for DHS. Say anything bad about DHS, it’s most likely true at least three days a week.

But let’s put the blame squarely on Jim Edgar and Gary MacDougal, the governor and his policy advisor who came up with the concept of DHS. It’s true that Blagojevich has not done a good job of running DHS, but the creation of the “mega-agency” was Edgar’s baby all the way.

And yes, Howe has been a mess for 20 years. Accreditation was lost in the past, but restored within a few months, as I recall. But the staff reductions, forced overtime and hiring problems at DHS/CMS have made a bad situation worse.

Comment by DuPage Dave Friday, Jun 13, 08 @ 6:06 pm