Case 1 - Expensive Clerks Who Are Not Clerks
This is part of an ongoing series about LA County government's wasteful practices.
A lot of County tasks involve rather routine and clerical work. Ideally a manager or specialist should not spend too much time on routine and clerical work. In some cases it can't be easily avoided, such as approving actions, also known as "signing off on requests". That's a manager's job. And illnesses and long vacations may also result in such. But misallocation is often chronic, not temporary.
Many on-going clerical and repetitive tasks can be given to just about ANY general clerk familiar with PC's with a bit of direct training and maybe written steps. They don't require any degree beyond high school graduation with decent grades.
If the general clerk gets stuck, they can contact a specialist or their manager. Needing occasional help is not a reason to have expensive people do ALL of it, but this is sometimes given as an excuse. They invent lots of excuses for waste, too many to list here.
Many are taught to view doing general clerical work as a loyalty test: it's a way to show you are a "team player" by "tolerating grunt work". Sometimes a specialist doing entry-level work is necessary, but it shouldn't be a long-term practice for a given task. As taxpayers, we want smart labor allocation, NOT loyalty tests. Rock the damn boat if you have to instead of kiss-up. Taxpayers don't want to pay a "kiss-up tax". We want them loyal to our wallets, not to lazy or egocentric managers.
There is a general "County Fraud" hotline, and I contacted them once about this. I did talk to a representative, but they never got back to me. It did not seem like this kind of waste was important to them. They prefer "direct" simple crimes; easier to process the paperwork. Slothful planning and labor allocation doesn't seem to count in their book. But wasted labor can add up to big money over time: Waste is waste; you don't have to (directly) bribe or rob somebody to have waste; inaction and kiss-up-over-logic can also result in vast waste. It can even cost more than direct lying and cheating.
And if there truly are no clerks, then at least assign the routine task to the lowest possible practical wage level. To use a hospital analogy, if you run out of custodians to mop the floors and can't hire new ones quick enough, you don't give the mopping job to doctors, but rather nurses. If and only if there are not enough nurses do the doctors do mopping. You work your way up the wage ladder. This seems common sense, but pressure to not-rock-the-boat blinds many County managers.
Often "budget shortfall" is an excuse given for not hiring more clerks. In the short term this may make sense, but in the medium and longer term it's usually more efficient to hire more clerks BEFORE hiring more high-wage employees. Managers and specialists freed up from clerical/routine tasks can assist other groups lacking experience at the moment, often saving money by preventing the need to hire a new manager or specialist. Just coordinate a little better across groups instead of letting managers hide in their silos with blinders on.
A short-term staff shortage is sometimes inevitable. A long-term "staff-shortage" is usually a sanity shortage on the part of management. There is no such thing as a "long term clerk shortage" at a large organization unless you as a leader are playing games or are clueless. A private company would get slaughtered by the competition if they habitually paid expensive specialists and managers to do rudimentary work. They learn to cross-coordinate or else get eaten by the market. The company would die!
I've asked many if they believe the "expensive clerk" approach is logical, and nobody defended it as inherently rational. It was either somebody's else's fault, or "that's just the way we do things" (i.e. "We are used to being wasteful.") They treat us whistle blowers like crap, using techniques typically known as "passive aggressive": delay, deflect, ignore.
One contributor to the problem is that the bureaucracy makes it so hard and long to hire somebody, that there's incentive to hire someone over-qualified since they can do both specialist and generalist (clerical) work. If one just hires an entry-level person, then the group has to jump through hoops again to hire a specialist if needed soon after. Thus, staff tends to be "top heavy" in terms of the ratio of specialists-to-generalists (or entry-level), making payroll heavier than it needs to be. The hiring process is especially grueling in departments that require extensive background checks, as these can add several months to hiring times such that many candidates find better jobs elsewhere during that time. It's probably cheaper to streamline such onboarding than to hoard the overqualified, but nobody has done a cost-benefit analysis and there's currently no pressure to, as nobody is spanking County labor wasters.
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