I’ve had issues with the state’s laxity in cashing checks since the Cayetano administration, and it’s discouraging to learn from June Watanabe’s Kokua Line report Wednesday that little progress has been made in 20 years.
During Gov. Ben Cayetano’s tenure, it was several fairly large checks I sent to a state agency that went uncashed for five months.
This was galling at a time of recession, when the state was running a $200 million deficit and initiating payroll lags to pay the bills.
In Gov. Linda Lingle’s time, it was income tax checks that weren’t cashed.
As the deficit soared to $1 billion in another recession and the state resorted to Furlough Fridays and delayed tax refunds, it took up to two months to deposit my April tax checks and up to a month to deposit my quarterly estimated tax payments.
It rankled to be threatened with stiff penalties if I didn’t pay on time, and then have my payment sit unused on somebody’s desk.
In contrast, the IRS deposits checks for federal taxes upon receipt; the lost interest from the state’s languor likely approached $1 million a year.
The state seemed to make headway under Gov. Neil Abercrombie, depositing my last April tax check 16 days after I mailed it and my final estimated tax payment in eight days.
I haven’t had to send a check since I became a Social Security pensioner, but according to Kokua Line, taxpayers are again complaining about delays of over a month in depositing their checks.
Maria Zielinski, Gov. David Ige’s tax director, described to Kokua Line a system in which overworked clerks with three balky scanners manually process 564,903 returns with checks, inexplicably keeping the check attached to the return until the end of the process instead of sending it out for immediate deposit.
In an age when electronic returns and checks can easily be sent and recorded instantly with no scanning or treks to the bank, Zielinski said "it’s not an overnight solution" because of the decades of bureaucracy built up around data processing, scanning and cashiering.
If only it had been decades of keeping up with the times to solve a simple problem.
As an interim fix, Zielinski hopes to lease a scanner from the bank that would allow quicker electronic check deposits, but the logistics of even that could take months.
The broader concern is that a government that can’t competently manage little tasks such as depositing checks will never get the big things right.
Until the civic culture prides sweating the small stuff over politics and bureaucracy, there will be no end of stories about bankrupt state hospitals, a state health exchange gone bust two years after receiving $200 million from Obamacare or massive Oahu rail cost overruns.
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
