Price of secrecy
The top brass at the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency can toss a $409,000 legal bill onto its bonfire of abuse of public money. That’s the amount PHEAA spent trying to keep its spending secret from three probing media organizations. It took 19 months and spending $65,000 of their own money, but the Harrisburg Patriot News, The Associated Press and WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh prevailed in court. The prime beneficiary ever since has been the public, which finally got a glimpse into PHEAA’s onerous spending habits. Those included $860,000 spent on fancy resorts in a five-year period, chartering a Lear jet and paying for an employee’s $128 tuxedo rental.
When you use precious dollars for bar tabs, golf outings and spa treatments, all under the banner of helping students pay for college, you have pretty good reason to spend another $409,000 to keep the public from finding out. Once that genie gets out of the bottle, the public’s going to be outraged and you’re going to end up with egg on your face.
So it’s been with PHEAA and its state legislator-laden board of directors, who’ve promised corrective action and have cut out the excesses of an era that stretched into the not-so-distant past.
But the larger moral of this story is how, in the absence of an open records law with real teeth, public entities like PHEAA can stack the deck against anyone wishing to examine how they do business. They can afford to spend $409,000 in court, something the average person with a desire to obtain information can’t dream of doing. So most of the time, the PHEAAs of the world win by default.
Only when those pesky news organizations won’t back down does the public get even a remote chance to find out what’s really been going on. But it shouldn’t be that way; you, as a citizen, should have easy access to such information, the same as any newspaper, radio or television station.
That’s why we have harped – and will keep harping -about the need for the Pennsylvania Legislature to pass a meaningful update to the Commonwealth’s aged and ineffective open records law. It’s still among the weakest in the nation, which means a revision is seriously overdue.
State Re. Timothy S. Mahoney (D-South Union) has introduced an open records bill that would short-circuit these shenanigans. Something needs done, and soon, to prevent the PHEAAs of the future from pulling the wool over your eyes to keep you even more in the dark.
Regarding PHEAA’s outrageous $409,000 legal bill, state Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak said it better than we could:”How many scholarships does that represent?”