Riding the Gravy Train

I'm glad the Chicago Sun-Times is on to this. The Blagojevich administration, under the guise of cutting costs, is actually awarding huge consulting contracts that are costing the state way more than they should.

Shortly after taking office in 2003, Gov. Blagojevich lamented that state agencies were paying computer consultants "two to three times the market value" and vowed "to cut the waste that has cheated the taxpayers for far too long."

Yet, more than two years later, computer consultants embedded in some state agencies are costing the state as much as three times the rate of equally skilled state computer employees who ostensibly do the same work, the Chicago Sun-Times has found.

In the Department of Children and Family Services, for example, the annual price for a pair of full-time, IBM-hired consultants is on pace to reach $283,000 apiece based on hourly rates. That would eclipse the governor's $150,700 yearly salary and the $248,200-a-year paycheck of the emergency medicine chief at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center.

Seventeen other technicians brought in under the IBM "Technical Services Program" are working 40 hours a week for DCFS, too. The agency is set to spend between 176,800 and $212,000 this year on each of them -- more than double the $80,600 the typical DCFS computer worker makes in salary and benefits.

In a recent interview, DCFS Director Bryan Samuels questioned the IBM pact, saying he believed that replacing the IBM-hired consultants with state employees or other contract workers would allow DCFS to hire as many as 20 new caseworkers to help fulfill the agency's mission of caring for abused and neglected children.

Read the whole article, things really are that bad.

I was amused to read that Central Management Services claims it's monitoring things. Well, I happen to know CMS has hired (non-IBM) consultants to work at $1500.00 A DAY (per consultant) on a system they don't really need and doesn't work as well as the one they have in most cases. Tons of money is being wasted in that agency alone much less the agencies they are allegedly minding.

All of this affects workers here in Springfield, be they State employess, potantial state employees or local contractors. The IBM/consultant invasion is doing a lot of displacing locally and costing all of us plenty.