Inspector generally has no power

Star Ledger ^ | 2-14-05 | Paul Mulshine

[BATNF]

Inspector generally has no power Sunday, February 13, 2005 I don't know about you, but I know where I'm going to be tomorrow morning. I'll be standing on the state line watching as all the crooked politicians, bribe-takers and bribe-givers leave the state.

The new inspector general is on the job.

I watched Mary Jane Cooper take the oath of office Thursday in Trenton. Acting Gov. Richard Codey gave a nice speech before she took the oath. But the speech was long on biography and short on details. It's nice to be told for the 10th time or so that Cooper was a single mom who worked her way through law school. But I'd like to know just how she's going to clean up what may be the most corrupt state in the union.

Her predecessor didn't get far. You probably forgot about him. I certainly did. Edward Neafsey, who is now a judge in Monmouth County, was named inspector general in 2000, during the Whitman administration. The creation of that post failed to impress Codey, who was then the Senate minority leader. He derided the new post as that of "inspector corporal."

Neafsey had a staff of 30. Cooper will have a staff of 12. I guess that makes her "inspector buck private" by the standard Codey endorsed when his party was out of power.

Now that the Democrats are in power, they've got an image problem. The last Democrat to win the governorship, James McGreevey, left office amid a flurry of corruption scandals. The remedy, his successor asserts, is to create an office of inspector general that reports directly to the governor.

John Farmer Jr. disagrees. Farmer was the attorney general who created the first inspector general's office. That post was set up to report not to the governor but to the AG. There were a couple of good reasons for this. One is that the AG's office already has the subpoena powers and powers of arrest necessary to successfully prosecute political corruption. Another is that the AG, once appointed, is constitutionally independent of the governor and can therefore prosecute with impunity any corruption in the executive branch.

Farmer said of the new post: "Legally it's weaker because the inspector general doesn't have the powers the attorney general has. There's going to be that inevitable pressure."

That pressure surfaced early in the McGreevey administration. Not long after taking office in 2002, McGreevey turned the inspector general's office into the "Office of Government Integrity," the responsibilities of which were as vague as its title. In 2003, Neafsey was reassigned and the Office of Government Integrity withered away.

Politically, that was a wise move on McGreevey's part. An independent inspector general might have started poking around into any of a number of scandals. Imagine for a moment that an inspector general who reports to the governor ends up reporting that the Guv himself has been caught on tape uttering what looks like a codeword for a payoff. The word "Machiavellian" doesn't begin to describe the maneuvers that would follow.

Codey is a different fellow, of course. Before swearing Cooper in Thursday, he said, "In her new role, I expect her to go right into the executive branch and find whatever waste, mismanagement and fraud may exist here." And perhaps he means it.

But an inspector general with a mere 12 employees is likely to have little impact. The enabling legislation for the position obliges the person in that post to oversee "the expenditure of state funds by, and the procurement process of, all state departments and agencies, independent authorities, county and municipal governments, and boards of education."

By my count, that includes more than 1,200 units of government. That's about one hundred agencies per inspector.

Compare this to the Department of Investigations in New York City, which has more than 270 employees. That agency has more departments, 22, than our inspector general will have staff members. New York City has lots of corruption hot lines and plenty of investigators, many of whom pose as members of the public to catch municipal employees who fish for bribes. The city also has a mandatory whistle-blowing law. Employees can be fired for failing to report any wrongdoing they witness. But if any whistles blow during Cooper's reign, she won't have the personnel to hear them.

"They were kind of our model," said Farmer, who is now a frequent contributor to these pages. "We wanted to build an inspector general like they had in New York City."

McGreevey cut that short. Now we're starting from scratch.

"Mary Jane's the right person," Farmer said of Cooper, who has a long background in rooting out corporate corruption. "But she's got to be really, really smart about target selection early on to get credibility. With a staff of 12, you can't afford many dead ends."

You may not be able to afford too many live ends either, if history is any indication. I wish Cooper good luck. As for the crooked politicians, I suspect they haven't contacted their travel agents just yet

[satchmodog9]

My wife is also a chronic double-clicker.