2015-041 - Status of Recommendations - Table 1

1. To comply with requirements in the State Administrative Manual, Health Care Services should refrain from funding permanent full-time employees with the State's funding mechanism for temporary-help positions.

2. To readily identify active IT and other contracts, Health Care Services should either revise its existing contract database or develop and implement a new contract database.

3. To ensure that all overtime hours worked are necessary, and to protect the health and safety of its employees and patients, Mental Health should implement the Legislative Analyst's suggestion of hiring an independent consultant to evaluate the current staffing model for Mental Health's hospitals. The staffing levels at Mental Health should then be adjusted, depending on the outcome of the consultant's evaluation.

1. To help it assess the effect of policy changes and manage operations in a cost-effective manner, Corrections should do the following:
• Ensure that its new data system will address its current lack of data available for statewide analysis, specifically data related to identifying the custody staffing cost by inmate characteristics such as security level, age, and custody designation.
• If implementation of its new system continues to be delayed, or if Corrections determines that the new system will not effectively replace the current assignment and scheduling systems used by the institutions, it should improve its existing data related to custody staffing levels and use the data to identify the related costs of various inmate populations.

5. To more closely align its operations with state law and its own policy, make certain that inmates are provided with an adequate level of supervision, and protect the health and safety of employees and inmates, Corrections should encourage the Department of Personnel Administration‡ to negotiate a reduction in the amount of voluntary overtime a correctional officer is allowed to work in future collective bargaining unit agreements, in order to reduce the likelihood that involuntary overtime will cause them to work more than 80 hours of overtime in total during a month.

6. To more closely align its operations with state law and its own policy, make certain that inmates are provided with an adequate level of supervision, and protect the health and safety of employees and inmates, Corrections should better ensure that it prevents the instances in which correctional officers work beyond the voluntary overtime limit in a pay period.

8. To ensure that it can determine whether it is in compliance with state law and can measure the efficacy of its programs in reducing recidivism, Corrections should track, maintain, and use historical program assignment and waiting list data by inmate.

1. To ensure that it maximizes its use of CaRES, the board should address the structural and operational flaws that prevent identification of erroneous information and implement edit checks and other system controls sufficient to identify errors.

1. To ensure that it has the information necessary to track progress in increasing veterans' participation in C&P benefits, and to identify where and how best to focus its outreach and coordination efforts, Veterans Services should require the CVSOs to submit information on the number of claims filed for C&P benefits and information on their outreach activities.

2. As Veterans Services expands its efforts to increase veterans' participation in C&P benefits, it should use veterans' demographic information, such as that available through the U.S. Census Bureau, and the information it plans to obtain from the CVSOs using its SAIM system, to focus its outreach and coordination efforts on those counties with the highest potential for increasing the State's rate of participation in C&P benefits.

3. Veterans Services should continue its efforts to pursue the SAIM system to enable it to monitor the quantity and quality of claims processed by the CVSOs, and ensure it meets legal requirements regarding auditing CVSO workload reports and verifying the appropriateness of college fee waivers. To the extent that Veterans Services is unsuccessful in implementing the SAIM system, the department will need to develop other avenues by which to meet its legal requirements.