That is good spin. But it is all it is.
The heat is on Insurance Commissioner Karen Weldin Stewart this morning after an audit of her department finds that her office awarded $16.1 million in contracts without following procedures under state procurement law, including maintenance of signed contracts and complete vendor files. To be clear, it is not like there is $16.1 million missing, but since procedures were not followed in assigning and maintaining these contracts, we have to wonder if the awarding of the contracts themselves are on the up and up.
KWS is spinning the audit as one she requested and that the findings are what she wanted.
Insurance Commissioner Karen Weldin Stewart requested the audit last year to identify “holes” in financial procedures she says predate her 2008 election. “I wanted to find the holes. We found them,” Stewart said. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was.”
So she wants us all to believe that the problems that have been found occurred during the watch of her predecessors, Democrat Matt Denn and Republican Donna Lee Williams, and that she was proactive in requesting the audit last year so that she find where the department was deficient. It may be true that some of the contracts were made before her tenure. But the problem is Karen Weldin Stewart did not request an audit to discover where her department was deficient. She requested an audit to test the ability of the Insurance department to prepare financial statements that following generally accepted accounting principles. So the auditing firm hired to do the audit, the Santora CPA Group, reviewed 7 random contracts, and found that the department violated Delaware law in each contract, whether by having unsigned contracts to a complete lack of vendor paperwork.
So the department has horrible bookkeeping, and we have to assume that the department is not compliant with Delaware law with respect to every contract the department has issued. Further, the audit found that the Commissioner has engaged in some no-bid contracting herself.
Contracts highlighted by the Santora audit include those awarded to Steve Kinion and Ed Ianni, who lead the insurance department’s captive insurance bureau, which regulates large self-insurance companies. Stewart hired Kinion and Ianni, supporters of her 2008 campaign, in 2009 at rates above $16,000 a month without seeking competitive proposals.
Here is my main problem with KWS’ spin that she asked for this audit and the audit found what she was expecting: she was elected in 2008 and took office in 2009. More than a year passes until 2010, when she requests this audit. If she was such the cleaner upper she is portraying herself to be, wouldn’t this be one of the first things you do once you take office. Further, the spin that the problems are with contracts that predate her tenure as IC is bogus, since the audit did not find any contract that was compliant. Not one.
KWS says she and her department will correct all the discrepancies. That’s nice. But I have a little question? What has she been doing until now?