Hawkins Suddenly Looks Golden
April 24th, 2007 at 6:10 pm
Albert Hawkins might just keep his job after all. It appears the Senate Nominations Committee will approve appointment of the embattled health commissioner to another two-year term as head of HHSC tomorrow afternoon.
If so, the vote will come in the nick of time: Hawkins — whose misjudgements wasted half-a-billion in taxpayer funds, according to a recent auditors’ report — must win Senate confirmation by the end of this session or step down.
We’d heard as late as last week that Hawkins’ nomination would remain stalled. The Nominations Committee first considered Hawkins on Feb. 28 in a combative hearing in which the commissioner was attacked for his handling of the HPV executive order, the Accenture-call center contract, and the TIERS computer system.
The committee has left Hawkins’ nomination pending for 57 days. Capitol veterans say it’s highly unusual for a nominee to be left hanging that long and still win Senate approval. But it appears that the governor’s office’s recent push to rescue Hawkins has been successful.
At least four — and perhaps five — of the seven senators on the committee will back Hawkins, by our count. Chair Mike Jackson of LaPorte, and fellow Republicans Jane Nelson, Glenn Hegar, and Austin Democrat Kirk Watson are confirmed “yes” votes. Only Eliot Shapleigh (D-El Paso) and Kevin Eltife (R-Tyler) are likely to vote against Hawkins.
Watson told the Observer this afternoon that he’s supporting Hawkins because he believes the commissioner will do a good job and be more responsive to the Legislature in the future. “The advise and consent process has worked,” he said.
Meanwhile, Shapleigh wondered who would be held accountable for HHSC’s multiple fiascos. “To say that incompetence is the best we can do is not a Texas tradition I value.”
As we reported in recent weeks, internal agency documents clearly show that Hawkins received numerous warnings — from the feds, contractors, and his own auditors — that the call center experiment and the TIERS software would likely falter. Here are our exposes on the Accenture contract and TIERS.
HHSC’s Inspector General recently released a report highly critical of TIERS. One of the report’s startling conclusions was that TIERS is too complex for its own good: The auditors found that HHSC’s old, antiquated computer system performed tasks an average of 45 minutes quicker than TIERS, and with greater accuracy.HHSC invested seven years of work and more than $400 million in software that’s inferior to what it already had.
The Burka blog nicely summarized HHSC’s position — mainly that TIERS works reasonably well. The agency contends that TIERS gathers more information than the old system, which “strengthens fraud preventions.”
We found that a curious claim. As we reported, problems with TIERS have prevented HHSC auditors from conducting a single fraud investigation on any program in more than two years.
Some of this may come up at the nominations hearing tomorrow. If the committee approves Hawkins, it will likely sever his nomination from other appointees (a common tactic on controversial appointments). That would mean a separate confirmation vote on the Senate floor — a vote that would need two-thirds of the senators to back Hawkins.
April 26th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
We have a similar problem in 18 California counties. After $776 Million, the CalWIN software doesn’t work right. Similar problem in Colorado also - CBMS. They have burned through $230 Million. The problem in all three places is the EDBC software. But software that could calculate benefits and eligibility with 100% accuracy could be created quickly and inexpensively. Politicians in all three states refuse to look at alternatives. Until the politicians stop listening to the “experts” who have led them to waste over $1.5 Billion in these three states alone, nothing will change. On the other hand, it could all be fixed within a few months for a tiny fraction of what has been spent.