Governor Jeff Landry has named a new Inspector General, and he’s also changing the duties of the position. Former Commissioner of the Administration Angele Davis replaces Stephen Street, who had the job for 18 years. Landry says the Office of the Inspector General will be in charge of finding efficiencies in state government.
“We need a department and office that focuses on that, that takes the reports from the legislative auditor and instead of letting them garner dust, actually picks them up and says ‘How can we do better?"” Landry said.
Landry says he wants the Inspector General to take the reports issued by the legislative auditor that provide recommendations on how state government agencies can be more efficient and implement them. The governor says his administration recently took an old recommendation on how the state can do a better job in checking Medicaid eligibility and it saved the state millions.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in two years. Just think how many hundreds of millions of dollars we could have saved, if somebody would have taken it off of the shelf a long time ago,” Landry noted.
The state inspector general, under the leadership of Stephen Street, would investigate allegations of mismanagement, misconduct, fraud and corruption within state government and turn those findings over to federal and state prosecutors.
It will take legislative action in the upcoming regular session to change the role of the state inspector general, but Landry doesn’t see how anyone would vote against it.
“If you don’t like to save money. If you like the waste money. If you like people who don’t need services to get those services, yeah, maybe you don’t want to reform it,” Landry said.