State Auditor Tells Berkshire Supporters She'll Run Again
Auditor Suzanne Bump gathered supporters in the Berkshires on Thusday to tell them that she has every intention to run for re-election. |
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Suzanne Bump feels she has unfinished business in the auditor's office.
And while the election is still a year and a half away, Bump gathered supporters in the Berkshires on Thursday to tell them that she has every intention to run for re-election.
"I'm committed to the job I am doing and I can make a substantial contribution to the taxpayers," Bump said at the early campaign fundraiser set at Zucchini's.
Bump is in the third year of her four-year term after being elected in a close race. Prior to that she was the secretary of labor for Gov. Deval Patrick.
"The auditor's office provides a very unique opportunity to make government better," said the Great Barrington resident.
Shortly after election, Bump made a splash when she launched an audit on the department she was taking over and later terminated 27 employees and reassigned 14 more because they were underqualified for the job.
Since then, she has continued to audit every department in state government and particularly dug into the the MassHealth system. There she found benefits being distributed to people who were not qualified, bills being duplicated and dentists performing unneeded tests.
Her findings led to the state tightening up the program by incorporating immediate wage matching with the Department of Revenue, requiring applicants to prove residency and putting systems in place to detect public assistance fraud.
"We cannot afford to care for people that are not eligible to be on that program," Bump said.
Most recently, Bump made headlines with a report that found that the addresses of 119 sex offenders matched the location of 75 licensed child-care providers. Most of those were offenders living in the same building but a different unit from a day care center, but for some it lead to the revokation of a license.
The finding showed that state Department of Early Education and Care was not cross-checking offenders' addresses with the licensed providers, which Bump made the reccomendation to do.
"No parent should have to worry whether their kid is in danger when they drop them off at day care," Bump said on Thursday.
But Bump says her job isn't intended to be punitive but rather just to find ways to make government function better, which is what she likes about the position.
"I want people to believe in government," she said.
The Legislature recently passed a health-care cost containment bill, which shifts payments from per medical service to outcomes — thus incentivizing providers to keep people healthy rather than pay per visit. The auditor's office has been assigned to keep track of that implementation and identify what works and what doesn't with that system.
The report isn't due until 2017 but Bump has already delved into the process collecting data for the baseline comparisons. The office is also required to audit every department every three years and an audit of the Department of Transitional Assistance is upcoming.
"We always have 50 to 80 audits in the works at a given time," she said.
So Bump hopes to continue working on those but her name has cropped up in many Democratic circles about a run for governor. She has told those who ask that she would rather to stay in her position for now — exactly what she told supporters Thursday.
Those in attendance included the entire Berkshire delegation, Mayor Richard Alcombright, many members of the Berkshire Brigades, and other Democrat leaders.
Tags: election 2014, state auditor, state officials,
