In the mission to find some of the $200 million in budget cuts ordered by Gov. Martin O?Malley, state Labor Secretary Tom Perez has come up with new ways to trim his department?s $175 million budget. The steps include issuing credit cards to employees and debit cards to the unemployed.
As the new secretary of labor, licensing and regulation, Perez said he?s asking questions about how his department spends money.
“I just want to learn about our systems,” said Perez, a former member of the Montgomery County Council who ran for attorney general.
At the department?s 90-person call center for unemployment claims in Cumberland, he asked, “How do you get your copy paper?” expecting the staff to say they go to the local office supply store.
Instead, they get boxes of copy paper mailed to them from Baltimore.
“We?re going to empower the manager in the local offices” by giving them credit cards, Perez said.
He also found that the agency was still used travel agencies to book trips, rather than booking them on the Internet.
“They don?t have the incentives to use low-cost airlines,” Perez said. “If you can save $100 a trip, pretty soon that amounts to real money.”
Even bigger savings could be made in going to e-mail for much of the correspondence sent by the agency, which licenses a variety of professions and trades.
To replace unemployment checks, the agency is considering giving out debit cards, which the unemployed could use to get money. Perez said the department would save money on processing checks because a bank would issue the cards free of charge to the government or taxpayer, making money on the “float,” the interest on the cash flowing through the account.
“We?re scouring our operation from top to bottom to identify those sort of efficiencies, so we can look the taxpayer in the eye and say we?re spending your money efficiently,” Perez said.
