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'via Blog this'The Office of State Inspector General was created in 1988 by former Gov. Buddy Roemer. Jindal and the Legislature backed laws in 2008 to give the office statutory protections to allow the agency the support and autonomy it needs to function without interference.
It became a law enforcement agency with investigative, subpoena and search and seizure powers. Its staff has expertise in both auditing and white-collar criminal investigation, offering an important combination of enforcement tools to obtain and analyze evidence. The office cooperates with other law enforcement agencies, and its work has brought corrupt individuals to justice.
The current Inspector General is Stephen Street, a lawyer who oversees an office of about a dozen employees. He is a former criminal staff lawyer with the Third Circuit Court of Appeal, a former public defender and a former Section Chief with the state Attorney General's Insurance Fraud Support Unit who handled white-collar prosecutions. He has extensive experience teaching courses on white-collar crime investigation.
In recent years his office has performed investigations revealing a range of problems, from mundane wasteful practices in state government to serious scams defrauding the public.
The Inspector General has documented abuses, such as excessive overtime by government employees and the illegal use of confidential law enforcement databases. He has brought state employees to justice for theft, including individuals who stole from pension funds and others who were in the practice of selling state-owned copper and brass equipment to recycling centers. He caught university employees profiting from fraudulent invoices from fake companies and in several cases nabbed individuals who submitted false information for very substantial amounts of recovery and disaster relief. More than a dozen people have been arrested in the past couple of years due to the Inspector General's investigations, and many of them already have been sentenced.
All this is done on an annual agency appropriation of about $1.7 million. For such a small office on such a modest budget, these are results that certainly have paid for themselves many times over.
This funding should be restored. The role and skills of the Inspector General's office are especially valuable during tight budget times. The state needs a self-motivated watchdog agency to stop waste, mismanagement, abuse and fraud in government.
The Legislature should continue to support the agency and its goals, both financially and politically. To suddenly eliminate this important watchdog function of state government would send a negative message nationwide that we've given up our efforts to make Louisiana an honest place for business.
We're not out of the woods yet in terms of cleaning up our image. The funding, autonomy and integrity of this office must be maintained as we continue our efforts to build the business climate in Louisiana.
The editorials in this column represent the opinions of The News-Star's editorial board, composed of President and Publisher David B. Petty, Executive Editor Kathy Spurlock and community representatives Kay Prince, Billy Haddad and Dan Robertson.
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