Eric Zorn has what should be one of the most telling quotes about Bill Brady all cycle:
“There is a lack of transparency,” he said. “Yes we have an auditor general. And he provides us with reports and audits within about two years. But the governor says, and (Comptroller) Dan Hynes says, we owe over $5 billion to our vendors. We don’t know who’s owed what.”
I followed up a moment later: “You’re saying we owe $5 billion, and we don’t know to whom we owe it?”
“People don’t,” Brady said.
“You don’t?”
“Nope.”
But Dan Hynes does. His office reported Thursday afternoon that there are exactly 204,688 unpaid vouchers worth $5.4 billion on the comptroller’s desk.
This is an incredibly stupid statement and, in fact, a State Senator could easily ask the Comptroller’s office for a report on the unpaid bills. More than that, it has to be easily available because vendors can check the status of payments online.
Yet, that’s not all. You can use SAM reports to check obligations by the state and get categorical unpaid obligations by agency and purpose. The manual is available here.
IOW, maybe a State Senator doesn’t know himself where all of this is, but a simple request to a half competent staffer could find the information quite easily. The Comptroller has done an incredible job making his office transparent. The only excuse for Bill Brady not knowing this is he must not have tried to look for the information. He’s not a curious man so that isn’t too surprising. However, it would be nice if more members of the press besides Eric would call him on this bull.
I think Rich has identified the consensus posture of the press in Illinois: We’ll neglect the November races, but we’ll feel really, really bad about that neglect after the election and we’ll (once again) promise to do better next time.
Rinse and repeat.
— MrJM