Reed Hall, who ‘boldly,’ ‘innovatively’ uses the private title of CEO for an organization that runs on public money, has written two defenses to his agency’s latest audit fiasco. The first of those appears as a few platitudinous paragraphs online (‘WEDC takes bold, innovative approach to economic development,’ subscription req’d, and the second as a reply to the Legislative Audit Bureau’s one-hundred-sixteen-page audit from this month.)
Consider how Hall touts his agency’s accomplishments, with the same “expected to create or retain” language that Republicans criticized ceaselessly (and rightly) in Pres. Obama’s stimulus package. Imprecision and ambiguity were once a problem the GOP criticized. Now, a sketchy phrase is at the center of how Hall describes the WEDC’s work.
Hall wants you to think that there’s been improvement in his agency’s performance, of course, but he deceptively hides the reason for better WEDC loan delinquency rates.
Hall does this by mentioning a May 2013 audit and the May 2015 audit, while simultaneously omitting information from a September 2014 audit that undermines his claims of a legitimately lower delinquency rate.
First, what Hall hopes you’ll take at face value:
As a result of our efforts, our loan delinquency rate dropped from 2.7 percent in 2013 to 0.2 percent in 2014. The uncollectable loan balance declined from $5.5 million in 2013 to $1.3 million in 2014, and the percentage of performance reports that are late fell from 55 percent to 5.4 percent in two years.
Then, the truth he omits, as revealed in a September 2014 audit:
Of the $7.7 million decrease in troubled loans held by WEDC, the biggest chunk — $3.2 million — came from loans that were written off by WEDC because they were 90 days past due.
For the state to proceed with the collection process, those loans had to be transferred from WEDC to the Department of Administration. So by itself that change is just a bureaucratic shuffle, not a gain for taxpayers.
The audit didn’t examine what had happened to the loans after they went to the administration department.
The next biggest chunk of past due loans, worth $2.1 million, had their contracts rewritten by WEDC to delay repayment by the borrowers and $1.3 million in loans were forgiven by WEDC in whole or in part.
Hall gets better figures by concealing that the WEDC has shuffled loans to another agency and has simply written many other loans off.
I’ll say there are two possibilities: Reed runs a multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-funded agency, yet is unable to count to three (skipping the second of three audits), or he knows that there have been three, but deceptively hopes you’ll remember only two.
Dunce or deceiver?
Hard to see how that’s an auspicious choice for Mr. Hall, no matter how bold and innovative he claims the WEDC to have been.