Not sexy enough for this shirt

Illinois remains a wasteland: Taxpayers pay high price when governments lose their way

"Procurement is not sexy, but procurement is the heart and soul of corruption," said Emily Miller, policy and government affairs coordinator for the Better Government Association. "That is where it continues to be bred and it lives and thrives."

A February University of Illinois at Chicago study estimated that political corruption costs state taxpayers no less than $500 million a year. Even if it fails to reach the level of criminal misconduct, the not-insignificant added cost of fiscal missteps and Keystone Kops-style oversight – a corrupted process, if you will – are well beyond the means of a state nursing a sizable budget deficit and even larger unpaid obligations.

The day before the inspector general's report on the aviation department's wrong turns on GPS, Illinois' Auditor General torched the Department of Healthcare and Family Services and Executive Ethics Commission over "serious deficiencies" in a process that resulted in the awarding of three state-worker health-insurance contracts worth $7 billion. One result was that it's difficult to know if the state got a good deal on the insurance or not.

Ironically, some of the problems cited stem from confusion over rules, responsibilities and requirements of revamped purchasing laws established to prevent the sort of corruption that thrived during ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich's administration.

"This was supposed to be the fix, and now all this waste happened after the fact," Miller said.

"It does seem to be verging on incompetence in this case unless they find a direct so-and-so gave money to so-and-so for the contract, which is what we find in the corruption reports, like the Blagojevich contracts," said Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who's now a UIC political science professor and co-author of the school's "Chicago and Illinois, Leading the Pack in Corruption" report last month. "The thing about waste and inefficiency is they're mostly out of sight."

The Office of the Auditor General's 169-page insurance-deal state audit report set off a wave of animated finger-pointing and finger-wagging.

Among the audit's findings: The state agencies signed off on a deal allowed a consulting firm to help review the bids that business relationships with each of the bidders; an original recommendation to award the contract was changed after an agency head met with the governor's office; one insurer scored a contract in 20 counties in which it did not bid and in 24 counties where it had no in-network primary-care physicians. And finally, that all of this should have been flagged before the deals were done.