Summary of Report 02-016

December 2001

Report Number 02-016

The Board of Medical Examiners, the Board of Examiners of Psychologists, and the State Board for Educator Certification can improve the efficiency with which they issue licenses or certifications and resolve complaints. Inefficiencies in agency processes reduce the quality of services these agencies provide. In addition, there are opportunities of these agencies to reduce costs in their licensing, certification and complaint resolution processes and reallocate at least $501,700 in resources to other activities. Current methods of data collection are inadequate for each agency to accurately diagnose reasons for these inefficiencies.

• In fiscal year 2000, BEP reported that it took an average of 460 days (15 months) to resolve complaints. This exceeded its performance standard of 375 days. The 460-day figure actually should have been calculated as 782 days, but it was understated due to the manner in which BEP calculated this average. The timeliness of complaint resolution is hindered by multiple levels of review.
  
  
• BME takes an average of 180 days to issue physician licenses to domestic applicants. This is more than the 80-day average for peer states. Delays are occurring primarily because BME has no standard criteria by which to evaluate applications. Similarly, BME could reduce its 328-day complaint resolution time by up to 108 days by discontinuing duplicative reviews and eliminating bottlenecks.
  
  
• SBEC's current 54-day time to certify an educator exceeds its fiscal year 2002 performance standard by 24 days. Discontinuing its electronic scanning system could allow SBEC to reduce processing time by at least 11 days.
  
  
• More than 67 percent of the activities in SBEC's educator certification process do not add value. The annual cost associated with these activities is approximately $321,000.
  
  
• More than half of the activities BEP staff perform when issuing new licenses do not add value. The annual cost associated with these activities is approximately $35,700.
  
  
• There is approximately $145,000 in staff costs associated with activities that do not add value within BME's licensing process.
  

Contact the SAO about this report.

Download the PDF version of this report. (02-016.pdf)

HTML Equivalent (utilizing Adobe's PDF Conversion by Simple Form).