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Red Tape Report
Tale of the (Red) Tape
Lots of people talk about the problem — Dave Bundy did something about it.
 Dave Bundy told his employees at the Children’s Home Society of Florida to document the amount of time spent on redundant bureaucratic procedures. His findings led lawmakers to make changes that will save Bundy’s non-profit anywhere from $75,000 to $100,000 a year. [Photo: Brook Pifer] |
“In the non-profit world, people are very mission-driven. If they spend hours and hours just writing and in front of a computer, they just feel they aren’t doing what they want to be doing,” says Bundy. “So we are constantly looking for ways to make that process more outcome-focused and efficient.”
Knowing that he would need more than just anecdotal evidence to illustrate inefficiencies in the state’s contract-monitoring process, Bundy instructed his employees to record every instance of monitoring by the Department of Children and Families, the Agency for Healthcare Administration and various other agencies with oversight responsibilities. As part of that tracking, employees were asked to make note of each individual document request they received from monitoring agents.
At the end of the exercise, Bundy was “shocked” by the findings. Between 2007 and 2008, Children’s Home Society identified 190 instances of site monitoring. Staffers reported spending a total of 4,961 hours gathering documents for reviewers — and nearly 12,000 hours assisting the reviewers while they were on site. “Our estimates were that it took us the equivalent of five to six full-time employees, all day, every day, all year to comply with all the requests,” says Bundy.
Bundy doesn’t dispute that the state agents monitoring Children’s Home Society’s programs are performing a legitimate function. It’s their job to ensure that taxpayers’ dollars are spent appropriately — but his internal survey showed how inefficient the process was and how much the state duplicated its own efforts. During an audit, for instance, it wasn’t unusual for a document to be requested between 80 and 90 times. In essence, “lots and lots of people are looking at the same stuff,” Bundy says.
Once he had concrete data pinpointing just how inefficient the process was — and where it was breaking down — Bundy worked with Sens. Ronda Storms (R-Valrico), Mike Haridopolos (R-Merritt Island), Ken Pruitt (R-Port St. Lucie) and other state lawmakers to come up with a plan to improve the process.
As a result, lawmakers last year passed HB 5305, which makes several key changes to how child welfare providers such as Children’s Home Society are monitored by the state. For one, it requires state agencies to take advantage of a “document vault,” an internet-based data warehouse where non-profit organizations can store key documents frequently requested by state agents. Secondly, it limits the frequency of administrative monitoring to once every three years for child welfare agencies that are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities or the Council on Accreditation of Children and Family Services.
Bundy estimates the document vault alone should free up about 849 staff hours. Recognizing accreditation and reducing administrative monitoring to once every three years should free up more than 1,500 staff hours.
After all, he notes, time is money: “If we shaved half of our FTEs devoted to just pulling stuff and putting it together, that’s $75,000 to $100,000 a year, and we’re just one organization.”
