Friends,
Well, that was a rough game for the Vikings sure did give us a fun season. Next year will be our year! I hope you got through the Snowmageddon last Monday without incident and are able to take in some of the Super Bowl festivities!
Employee Gainsharing Program Audit
This week the Office of the Legislative Auditor released a report on the compliance of the "Employee Gainsharing Program" with state law. The program allowed state employees who recommended cost-saving ideas to be eligible to share in a portion of the documented savings. The Minnesota Department of Management and Budget (MMB) is supposed to document these savings in order to calculate the cost-saving bonuses for state employees. The audit showed that MMB was not complying with the law as it deemed the law to be too difficult to implement.
Rather than find a way to attempt to follow the law, MMB has decided to instead ignore the law. The audit concluded by saying the mandate in law is clear, and MMB should take steps to comply with the law.
The point of this law is to allow the creative and talented people working inside government to come up with ways to save the taxpayers money. They are the ones doing the work and have a different perspective than almost anyone else. This law hoped to take advantage of that perspective, reward the employee, and save the taxpayer money all at the same time. Hopefully, this audit will serve as a wake-up for MMB to begin to implement this good-governance law.
New 2018 Laws in effect January 1
While much of the great work we did during the 2017 Session went into effect later in 2017, a few laws went into effect on January 1st, 2018. Among the new laws were uniform election dates, more specialty license plates, and two health-related reforms -- one will make it easier for patients to refill their prescription eye drops and another will allow home health care workers to count training for those who are hard of hearing towards their annual training requirements.
The full list of new laws from the 2017 Session is available here.
Contact Me
If you ever have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding any issue related to state government, please feel free to contact me at either 651-296-5387 or rep.roz.peterson@house.mn.
Sincerely,
