Legislature needs to provide more oversight to executive branch agencies’ spending

The Governor’s Mansion is not the only vacant floor space costing the state dearly.
The state auditor’s office will report today to a legislative committee that the state has paid nearly $1 million for vacant office space at a Fairmont mall over nearly three years.
That’s after terminating the lease for the space in May 2015, yet continuing to make monthly $30,000 payments on several sites at the Middletown Mall until February.
Though this malfeasance rests with the state Department of Health and Human Resources and the state’s Real Estate Division, it’s indicative of government.
The governor has acknowledged that he is aware of this situation and ordered disciplinary action. He has also ordered that both agencies act to recoup these misspent taxpayer dollars.
That’s about all one can expect at this point, in this latest episode of malfeasance that spans two administrations in Charleston. Unfortunately, these instances of impropriety are something else we have come to expect from our state government.
It’s self-evident that our state needs to do more than just react after the fact to such egregious incidents.
Common practices should catch such a misappropriation of public funds in each of these agencies.
Most businesses would have ceased payments for a lease, effective immediately, once it was canceled.
Employees — public and private — are paid to be responsible and pay attention to such details.
But if they fail, there are usually policies and processes in effect that catch such payments in short order. Canceling a service or a product is something that is done often and considered a normal aspect of any business or agency.
We applaud the auditor’s office for uncovering this waste of taxpayers’ funds and its efforts to make such misconduct transparent.
But we can do better than solely relying on the state auditor’s or legislative auditors’ oversight after the damage is done in such cases.
The public, for one, is also encouraged to keep tabs of its own on state agencies via the wvCheckbook.gov site, which details how state money is spent.
Still, though the DHHR and the Real Estate Division fall under the executive branch’s purview, we urge the Legislature to look at initiatives to rein in such malfeasance.
Much like discussions during this past legislative session to oversee the judicial branch’s spending, it’s clear the executive branch is not doing much better with its budget.
Just determining if agencies’ budgets are balanced may be a matter of course, but it’s imperative lawmakers or their proxies look these spending plans over — line by line — for hidden or misspent funding.
Otherwise, we’ll continue to get what we pay for — a vacant government.