Lincoln Journal Star. April 20, 2024.
Editorial: DHHS audit reveals agency, new director have work to do
The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services likely mishandled tens of millions of state and federal dollars last year, handing out millions in taxpayer funds through various programs without verifying whether the care providers and individuals met grant criteria or used the money for its intended purpose.
That was the chief finding of State Auditor Mike Foley’s annual audit of Nebraska’s state agencies that took particular aim at HHS, which accounts for roughly 40% of state spending.
It can’t be said that those findings are shocking or even a surprise. The troubled department has struggled with management issues for years, with its spending and contracting processes regularly assailed by audits and investigations.
In February, for example, Foley flagged “flagrant abuses” of a Medicaid program administered by HHS that has been plagued with “longstanding fraud.”
In last month’s report, auditors found HHS paid out $21.4 million in pandemic-era federal funds for employee retention and improvement to developmental disability providers, assisted-living facilities and nursing homes but failed to verify that providers used the money for its intended purposes.
A sampling of 25 long-term care facilities revealed the misuse of $20,153 in Medicaid funds by HHS, which failed to verify recipient incomes to ensure they were eligible for Medicaid, suggesting, Foley said, that as much as $31.7 million in tax dollars were at risk of being misused.
The audit also found that as much as $5.3 million from the Federal Child Care and Development Block Grant program was mishandled statewide under the program.
Cleaning up the troubling mess unearthed by the auditors and establishing controls and procedures to ensure that similar failures to properly distribute and verify spending under all the programs fall into the lap of HHS Director Steve Corsi, who was appointed by Gov. Jim Pillen in September, four months after the July 2022 to June 2023 audit ended.
Controversial because of his online engagement with anti-LGBTQ social media posts and his initial failure to disclose his ties to a consulting firm that was awarded a $10 million no-bid contract months before Pillen hired him, Corsi was confirmed by the Legislature in March.
Now Corsi, who in Foley’s words “inherited an agency with some major issues,” needs to earn the trust of not only the Legislature but all Nebraskans.
That trust-building must start by transparently dealing with the issues raised by the audit, and ensuring that spending under those programs will be properly monitored, then by moving through the laundry list of problems in programs and their execution that have plagued the troubled department for decades.
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North Platte Telegraph. April 20, 2024.
Editorial: Enough with Postal Service doublespeak
Some 30 to 40 people carried picket signs in North Platte Thursday, calling on the U.S. Postal Service to scrap its plans to move most western Nebraska mail sorting to Denver.
We wager each one of those sign-holders represented 3,000 or more fed-up people in the 691 ZIP codes.
It isn’t just us. Two days earlier, in Washington, D.C., a U.S. Senate committee let Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have it because his so-called “Delivering for America” reorganization plan is delivering the exact opposite everywhere it has been implemented.
It was bad enough for greater Nebraska 30 years ago when that era’s Postal Service bigwigs basically abolished local mail sorting in favor of a handful of regional processing centers.
One of them was built in North Platte. Now even it’s on the verge of being downsized into a “local processing center” that won’t process incoming local mail.
No, really. Even cross-town North Platte mail will go to Denver and back. The Postal Service admitted as much at a March 28 information meeting.
Richmond, Virginia, was the first target of DeJoy’s plan last summer. Since it was implemented, Virginia’s mail delivery rate has plummeted from 89% to a nation’s worst 66%, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has reported.
Texas has reported similar problems, as has the Atlanta area since its metro-area sorting was consolidated.
DeJoy said at Tuesday’s D.C. hearing that it’ll take months to smooth things out, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
At the same hearing, U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission Chairman Michael Kubayanda said on-time delivery in the Atlanta area had collapsed to 36% for first-class mail and 16% in March for letters and cards.
“Do you think that one of your private-sector competitors would have rolled out a new system that would reduce on-time delivery to 36% and then say it’s going to take months to fix it?” U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff asked DeJoy.
Then he added: “I wrote you on March 14. Did you get my letter?”
DeJoy said he hadn’t read it, the Atlanta paper wrote.
Look: Every corner of this country deserves far better from our government than just maintaining North Platte’s type of status quo on mail delivery.
We get the argument, sort of, about sending bulk mail and even some packages through centralized sorting centers in North Platte or even Denver.
But Nebraska has exactly four cities of 50,000 people or more and just 16 with 10,000 or more. Most of our local post offices count their incoming or outgoing mail in the low thousands. Or hundreds. A few dozen. Or less.
Does the Postal Service really expect us to believe it can’t keep mail staying in the same ZIP code (or two, like North Platte’s 69101 and 69103) at its local post office to be put in the right bags or boxes for delivery?
Don’t try selling western Nebraskans on that. Just one winter blizzard exposes its insanity. It was a foolish idea in the 1990s. It’s foolish today.
Yes, North Platte wants to keep its regional Postal Service center. But don’t tell us this new system is efficient. The old one isn’t, either.
END