THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702070975
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Dave Addis
LENGTH: 88 lines
If you are planning to spend this Sunday afternoon scrounging scraps of paper from your drawers and shoe boxes to prepare for your annual financial proctoscopy from the Internal Revenue Service, here is a thought that should cheer you in your work:
The IRS, to little fanfare, admitted last week that it had pretty much wasted $4 billion on computers that will not do what they are supposed to do.
Four billion dollars. Entire states - Nebraska and Maine are examples - chug along nicely on less money than that every year. It would take every man, woman and child in the nation of Belize about 10 years to produce that amount in goods and services.
You are entitled at this point to open your windows and scream in bloody outrage that the very agency that can put you in jail for overstating the value of those knickers you donated to Goodwill has just dumped $4 billion down a rat hole and you, or anybody else, cannot hold them accountable. You do get to pay for it, though.
Sort of makes you want to grab somebody by the throat and shake 'em, doesn't it? Yeah, me too.
But we'd best save some of that rage for ourselves, because each of us shares a piece of the blame. As the cartoon sage Pogo once observed, ``We have met the enemy, and he is us.''
Here's why: Arthur A. Gross, a hard-charger efficiency expert hired last year to figure out how the IRS had fouled up its computer upgrade, came to the conclusion that, for one thing, the agency lacks the ``intellectual capital'' to solve the problem.
That's a polite way of saying there aren't enough really smart computer people in the IRS to make the system work.
And why is that? The estimable Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., co-chairman of a panel that's investigating the IRS bungle, said it's because the government has a hard time hiring the sort of talent it would take to get the project on track.
``The market is bidding up the price for people who have these skills,'' Kerrey said, ``and we just can't dole out big salaries.''
Executives who manage large corporate information systems, according to the New York Times, make as much as $378,000 in salary and bonuses. That's more than twice the highest federal salary and bonus. In addition, the corporate-information gurus typically get stock options and other incentive pay that the government can't offer.
And, the overhauled IRS computer system, when up and running, would be a larger and more difficult project than any private-industry computerization, due to its vastness and the complexity of a changing tax code that would require a constant tweaking of the software.
But because of our populist-driven belief that nobody on the government payroll should earn much more than the rest of us, we have wasted $4 billion on a project that might have been rescued by a handful of highly skilled professionals earning less, in total, than a star forward for the Chicago Bulls.
There is a big difference between ``cheap'' and ``efficient.'' In this case, we taxpayers are biting a silver bullet because we're too cheap to hire good help.
As a people we are too easily taken in by populist politicos, Ross Perot types who would wave a $600 toilet seat in our faces and claim that they've found the key to all that waste, fraud and abuse up there in Washington. ``Vote for me,'' they'll tell you, ``and you'll never have to worry about another bureaucrat getting another pay raise as long as I'm around.''
We love to hear that stuff - right up to the point when those low-cost, befuddled bureaucrats shovel $4 billion into a furnace somewhere.
It may be acceptable to pay members of Congress $133,600 a year - about what a decent ad executive earns - or the president, $200,000, about par with a good tax lawyer. Many of those elected officials have made their mark elsewhere in life. They benefit from the power and prestige of their jobs and have vast opportunities in private enterprise if they leave office.
But should we really expect people with highly specialized skills to labor in anonymity at the IRS, or the National Institutes of Health, or other critical government posts, for one-half to one-fourth of what they could earn in the private sector?
As the leading free-market capitalist nation, the home of the best-run businesses in the world, why do we have such trouble with the idea that government, too, should be run like a business?
That means we hire people qualified to do the work, and we pay them a salary and incentives that will keep them industrious and on-board.
The alternative is to hire mediocrity, pay accordingly, and just throw our hands up and hope for the best.
That's what we've done with the IRS, and what we got was a $4-billion mistake.
How many more of those can we afford? MEMO: Dave Addis is the editor of Commentary. Reach him at 446-2726,
or addis(AT)worldnet.att.net.