Face The State Staff Report
DENVER - House GOP leaders are calling for an investigation into possible abuses by state budget officials, alleging deliberate efforts to miscalculate the fiscal impact of proposed laws.
House Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker, filed a request with State Auditor Sally Symanski asking her office to look into how Legislative Council staff calculate "fiscal notes" before they are passed on to lawmakers for their use. Fiscal notes are memos prepared by the Legislative Council staff that indicate how much each bill would cost taxpayers and how many, if any, new employees the bill would require. Fiscal notes are later revised if an amendment to the bill changes its financial impact. A big fiscal note will almost always kill a bill, especially for programs that may require additional revenue to cover costs.
May said he requested the audit after discovering examples where the cost of implementing a bill was underestimated by the Legislative Council staff, resulting in an increase of hundreds of thousands of dollars in state spending — unbeknownst to lawmakers who had voted for the legislation.
“I want to know what controls are in place,” May said. “We rely on these fiscal notes to make decisions. When we pass something, we need to be able to count on those fiscal notes.”
In his letter to Symanski, May detailed what he called “serious discrepancies” between the estimates that are being given to legislators and the actual cost of some bills.
That discovery came when a legislative policy analyst in the House Minority Office noticed that a certain fiscal note did not reflect the actual impact it had on the state budget. The analyst noticed the difference as the budget was being debated in the House.
The bill, 2007's Senate Bill 242, created an office of health disparities within the Department of Public Health and Environment. The fiscal note found there was no fiscal impact to the state budget since the office would be paid for with private funds.
Gov. Bill Ritter signed the bill into law last year.
However, the "long bill" narrative, the detailed description of the full budget, says something different. It states, "the health disparities office will receive $233,000 following the loss of private-sector funding."
According to Rep. Jim Kerr, R-Littleton, chair of the Legislative Audit Committee, Symanski said the audit request was a reasonable idea and that it is important to find out how fiscal notes are influenced.
“We just want to make sure there is accountability,” Kerr said. “[We’re] just trying to figure out how this happened. When we pass a bill, there needs to be a clear understanding of the numbers.”
May also expressed concern about other fiscal notes. "There are a couple of items that departments just plain lied to us about how much something would cost," he said. "We passed a bill that was totally funded with gifts, grants and donations—the next year those dried up and there were three new FTEs being paid for by the general fund." FTE stands for full-time equivalent, a unit of measure of total staff manpower.
May was referring to House Bill 1341 from 2007, which modified the number of full-time employees assigned to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The bill's fiscal note states that only three new employees are needed, while the state budget later allocated over 20 new FTEs to the COGCC.
The audit committee will take at least 90 days to decide on how to proceed but is expected to reach a conclusion before November. May requested that the audit be completed before next session.