Editorial: Don’t let more ’emergency contracts’ be a Harrisburg habit post-covid
Share this post:
Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
It’s the kind of advice everyone has heard. The most common of common sense. If you spend money, know what you are getting in return.
And if it is good advice for someone on a fixed income double-checking a grocery receipt to make sure all the sale prices matched up, it is all the more important for a government agency spending taxpayer money.
So why would the state ever be cavalier about a contract?
Lawmakers are looking into what happened with emergency contracts in Pennsylvania in 2020. According to a Spotlight PA story, over the previous five years, state agencies made about 135 emergency procurement requests a year. Those are requests that went outside the normal bidding process because of some exigent circumstances.
But during the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 emergency procurement requests almost quadrupled to 483. Of those, half were specifically covid-19 related. Only 15 of the 483 were denied.
The number of contracts wasn’t all that ballooned. The total price went just as high, jumping from $81 million to $340 million. Rep. Jason Ortitay, R-South Fayette, is leading the legislative review of a process he called “not very transparent.”
That’s a problem when the money being rushed through is coming out of taxpayer pockets.
It’s even worse when the state isn’t getting what it paid for.
Take the Department of Health’s emergency contract with Insight Global to do contact tracing and outreach to those exposed to covid-19. It was a completely necessary effort to try to mitigate spread of the disease. The contract was awarded in July 2020 for $22.9 million. By March 2021, it mushroomed to $57.8 million.
Two months later, the company was fired after a data breach exposed people to something other than a virus — unsecured personal information.
But that couldn’t happen again, right? Surely someone has learned their lesson and a year later, better safeguards are in place, and with covid restrictions rolled back, there will be less emergency action taken with contracts. Sorry, no. Spotlight PA discovered the Department of Health used the same process to deliver a $34 million contract to Public Consulting Group LLC to pick up where Insight Global left off.
With the spread of the delta variant of covid-19, contact tracing is still important despite the number of people who have been vaccinated. That is not the issue. It is just hard to accept that during the time three vaccines have been developed, manufactured and injected into millions of Pennsylvanians, a solution couldn’t have been found for a bureaucratic loophole in financial accountability.
Emergency procurements are something that should be possible. The state should be able to move outside of the red tape obstacle course when necessary. During a flood, there isn’t time to bid for a shelter to relocate people. During a pandemic, the state might have to do what it has to do to acquire medical equipment. That makes sense.
But Insight Global was fired two months ago. The state could have bid that job the same day and followed the proper steps for a regular contract rather than setting up the taxpayers for another multimillion-dollar pig in a poke.