By Peter Santos for Kandit News & Views
Governor Lou Leon Guerrero vetoed Bill 14-38 which was a re-introduction of Bill 213-37, also vetoed, which would authorize the Office of the Public Auditor (OPA) to establish deadlines for government agencies and instrumentalities to submit financial and program data to the OPA and which would impose an initial $250 fine, to be paid personally by the agency head for failure to comply and $250 for every 30-day period thereafter. While this might sound like a good idea, there are many questions that need to be asked.
First, does this bill make sense? Does this bill address the underlying issues? If not, then it’s just trying to treat the symptoms and not the problem.
Second, will this bill actually fix the problem? In the veto letter, the governor outlined why the OPA’s suggestion of enacting this law is short-sighted because it does not address the underlying issues that are causing the delays in the submission of reports and data. If a proposed solution does not address the underlying issues, then it can never fix the problem.
In order to fix a problem, the root causes need to be understood so that an effective solution can be developed. Throwing money at a problem almost never fixes the problem. Punishing people who do not have total control over the multiple factors that precipitates the problem, will never fix the problem.
The solution is a total system overhaul. There needs to be a quarterly requirement for agencies to submit their expenditure reports with supporting documentation to a GovGuam database maintained by the OPA. If an agency does not submit their reports and documentation, their next allotment will not be released. This will force agencies to stay current. There’s a saying, “it’s far better to keep up than to catch up.”All agencies need standard operating procedures where no one person has sole access to documentation. It cannot be that when someone gets sick, retires, resigns, or dies, that no one else has access to the agency’s records. All information should be in a place where authorized personnel have access.
The Attorney General’s Office should be the one leading the charge in facilitating and instituting this change in how GovGuam does business. The agencies should be set up for success. The Chief Legal Officer for the government, who is the attorney general, should be practicing “Preventative Law.” GovGuam is the AG’s client and the AG is required to provide services to the agencies every step of the way. Train, advise, and review their work and address their legal needs. In this way, there would be no need to prosecute them.
The OAG shouldn’t be out on witch hunts against its clients, it should be ensuring it doesn’t get to a point where there needs to be prosecution. The AG should focus on prosecuting actual criminals, including those that are stealing government resources. Right now, the AG is hell-bent on looking for a corruption case that he can’t see straight and at the expense of actually prosecuting crime. We need to just put this AG in the rearview mirror and choose the next AG who will stay in his lane and move us forward and regain all the ground that we have lost going backwards all this time. He has not delivered on any of his campaign promises and has gutted the OAG of experienced employees and attorneys. I am sure that is not what he had hoped to do, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Good intentions alone without tangible results are not what Guam needs. It’s woefully inadequate. Guam needs an AG with competence, experience, and integrity, and who understands the problems in order to find the right solutions.
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Peter Santos is originally from Agat, is a former GPD Police Officer, Army JAG, Local Prosecutor and is now a Staff Attorney at the Alternate Public Defender.
