State Agencies Pay Top Dollar for Contractors
State agencies are spending tens of millions of dollars every year on information technology contract workers, employees who aren’t on the state payroll – but whose pay often dwarfs those who are.
The average IT contractor makes more than $100,000 a year, more than 99 percent of state employees. Several haul in well over $200,000 a year – more than the agency commissioners who hired them.
State officials say the pay matches the specialized work: managing massive computer and telephone systems in some of Texas’ most unwieldy state agencies.
“One of the things we need is specific expertise, project ...
Comments (3)
2felters
This isn't even a new problem -- agencies have been wasting money on contractors ever since Bush was governor and hell-bent on eliminating state employees. I was an office manager with the Texas Workforce Commission when they paid millions to Andersen Consulting to design a paperless unemployment claim. The result was pure garbage with no "artificial intelligence". It was purely fill-in-the-blank. We were already doing that in my office for FREE. When a claimant came in we simply used the existing data entry system and entered their information without first writing it down. When Andersen failed to come up with a system by the end of their contract TWC paid them 2 million extra to keep bumbling along!
At least I did get an early retirement out of the personnel reductions...
Bret
Not to argue the main thrust of the article, but stacking up a contractor's fees against the salary of some vague average state employee isn't a meaningful comparison. For starters, fees are the end of the state's financial commitment to a contractor, while the benefits burden on top of a state employee's salary, which comes in at 49% of salary, according to the Employee Retirement System of Texas (http://www.ers.state.tx.us/news/articles/20090504.aspx), brings that "average" employee's cost to $55,468 per year. I would also be curious to see the average *DIR* employee salary in that comparison instead. And since I was curious, I spent five minutes with the DIR's legislative appropriations request for 2010-11, and it looks like *their* average annual salary (burdened) was in the range of $70,000 to $72,000 (I'd need to spend more than five minutes to nail down their FTE count and their "other personnel costs" to be more precise.)
Does the DIR waste money? Shooting fish in a barrel. But how about putting some teeth in the analysis?
statesmart
One point I think that was glossed over is the fact that state officials put many different kinds of employees on a contract basis to hide the number of real employees they have working for them.
Then you have a large contigent of state employees who have quite working for the state only to come back on a contract basis. If you don't want to pay a competitive salary for a state employee this is what happens. So instead of giving employees raises they can come back and make twice what they were making. Again, they don't have to be counted as a full time employees so it makes the agency look good.
Since the Republicans have been in office there has been push to reduce the number of state employees. In almost every case that they have reduced the number of state employees, it has cost the state more money. But hey, they can just bury this in their budgets and keep information from the public by making a request for public information a joke. Try making a serious public information request to examine a state agencies true expenses. Then see how much work an agency will go through to keep information (and information in a usable format) financial information from the public.
In my experience, you can't get a contractor to do the work that state employees will do for half the cost.