A legislative column by Senator Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin)

 

The word slob conjures images of an unkempt, careless, and all-together sloppy individual.  This is not the kind of individual one would likely trust with important duties or nice things.  Unfortunately, for many years Wisconsin’s budget process had many of the hallmarks of a slob.  Sloppy budgeting is the reason for the State Legislative Oversight of Budgeting, or SLOB, Act: to clean up the budgeting process and spend taxpayer money more carefully.

 

Under the last administration, Wisconsin ran up big budget deficits while also raising property taxes.  In the lead up to the November 2010 election, Republicans ran on the platform to get the state’s financial house in order and usher in an era of responsible budgeting.

 

Wisconsin voters sent a clear message with the November 2010 election: lawmakers need to start budgeting responsibly.  Since then, Republicans followed through on the campaign promise to be fiscally responsible by approving a balanced budget for the first time in decades and eliminating the $3.6 billion deficit while not increasing taxes.  Especially during these difficult economic times, as many taxpayers are just trying to make ends meet, the greatest sign of respect the state can pay its people is to spend their precious funds prudently.

 

The Republicans’ balanced budget has put Wisconsin on the right track; however, additional structural reforms are necessary to ensure smart budgeting during the future.  For far too long, state agency bureaucrats operated with little accountability for the spending taxpayer funds.  Legislators allocate money to each agency in the biennial budget, and are largely out of the loop about the expenditure of those funds.

 

At the heart of the SLOB Act is the idea state agencies should be accountable for spending taxpayer funds. Once every three months, a quarter of all state agencies must prepare and present a report of their fiscal condition and operations to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee.  The agency presentations will rotate so that each year every state agency will appear before the Joint Legislative Audit Committee.  Annual accountability before the Joint Legislative Audit Committee will imbue state agencies with the thrifty mentality of spending someone else’s money and force bureaucrats to identify areas of budgetary excess.  Bureaucrats must be accountable to their boss, in this case the taxpayers of Wisconsin and their elected representatives.

 

An important part of the balanced budget created a Waste, Fraud, and Abuse Commission to search for ways the state can be a better steward of taxpayers’ money.  The Commission issued its final report last week, and identified nearly half a billion dollars in annual savings from state agencies.  These savings come from a variety of source, from reviewing state office space leases, to finding efficiencies through shared services at various levels of government, to exposing and eliminating fraud in state welfare programs. 

 

The savings found by the Commission are significant.  The important issue is that savings were found because someone bothered to look.  Taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of dollars year after year because there was never an impetus to spend more effectively.  After the SLOB Act becomes law, that will change.  Bureaucrats will be held accountable for the way taxpayer money is spent, and a more responsible approach to budgeting will become institutionalized.