Lies, Damned Lies and Consultants

      King

As Mark Twain put it, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

It’s an effective and persuasive phrase to use when bolstering a weak position or casting doubt on an opponent’s argument. The kind of argument where lots of numbers are being impressively tossed around. You know, the “smoke and mirror” type of argument obscuring the fact that the numbers just don’t add up.

For some time now, state government has hired prestigious consultants who excel in tossing around numbers and making enticing promises.

These expert consultants really don’t care if you understand their statistical spreadsheets. The important thing to them is that you, the hard-working taxpayers of Arkansas, keep paying for those statistics.

When I was first elected in 2006, legislators spent lots of time working on policies and budgets. We didn’t spend near as much taxpayer money for expensive consultants; we listened to our constituents.

Today, however, a shocking amount of tax dollars increasingly goes to “consultants.” During the past 10 years more than 600 million Arkansas tax dollars have been paid to just a few “consulting” firms based in London, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boca Raton, Fla., and New York.

These few consulting firms all promised tremendous “savings” in exchange for millions in fees they charged Arkansas taxpayers. They promised deals of a lifetime! But the realities turned out to be quite the opposite.

Global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company serves leading businesses, governments, non-governmental organizations and not-for-profits in solving their clients’ toughest issues. For their $5 million fee, McKinsey’s executive summary detailed how they could save Arkansas $500 million. Savings would come from revamping salaries of state employees and making government more efficient. Their impressive recommendations didn’t end up saving Arkansas any money at all, but instead increased state spending by $100 million a year.

And the people of Arkansas are now paying high salaries to directors of state agencies, who are mostly political appointees who themselves are also paying consultants for advice on how to do their jobs. How ironic is that?

In 2008, Gov. Mike Beebe promised Arkansans that raising the severance tax on natural gas would bring in vast amounts of tax money. His experts based their estimates on a “conservative” price of eight-dollar gas. Guess what? The price of natural gas soon plummeted to less than two dollars, missing their estimate by 400 percent. Aren’t you glad you didn’t buy stock from them?

In 2013, your tax dollars paid experts to estimate the cost of Medicaid expansion. They predicted 215,000 new enrollees. That estimate was blown out the second year of expansion, which grew to the size of Pulaski, Faulkner and Saline counties combined. Can you imagine hiring an expert to count the state’s population, and they neglected to include central Arkansas?

The prestigious consultants promised “savings” through optimistic assumptions. They promised that spending more on their program would result in savings for other programs, like education and highways. Time, however, has shown that not to be the case. Education, for example, is actually getting a smaller percentage share of the state budget.

Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s experts misled the people of Arkansas in the same way, promising that expanding their program would produce monetary savings for highways. The reality has been that money to fund highways comes from raising taxes, not program expansions.

In 2015, consultants were hired to help reduce crime and prison overcrowding, both of which continued to worsen. The ultimate absurdity is that former Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, the governor’s nephew who promoted the crime bill, is now in federal prison.

In 2016, Sen. Jim Hendren, a cousin of Jeremy Hutchinson, and Rep. Lane Jean pushed to hire a Philadelphia consulting firm to advise them on our tax code, even though our taxes had already been studied at length.

I was quoted at the time as saying that hiring a consultant was a waste of money because governmental staff, already drawing state salaries, were qualified and could easily do the job. Eventually, the committee ended up firing the consultants because they could never get their facts straight.

I will continue to press on writing about consultants and their fiscally disastrous agendas. Consultants get hired because they have lobbyists on their payroll. It is a questionable practice that needs serious investigation.

For too long, consultants and their lobbyists have backed up their trucks to the state treasury, loaded up and hauled off millions, while Arkansas taxpayers are left to pay the bill. Leaving all of us the poorer from the consequences of their disastrous policy recommendations.

••• Bryan King of Green Forest represents District 28 in the Arkansas State Senate. District 28 includes all of Carroll County.