AUGUSTA — The Legislature’s Government Oversight Committee is looking at ways to prevent something like the Maine Center for Disease Control’s document-shredding scandal from happening again.
The committee on Wednesday asked its Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability, or OPEGA, to draft legislation to implement the recommendations made in 2009 by the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices. That commission said the state should, among other things, bring together Maine’s various ethics documents to create a centralized of code of ethics for state employees and make ethics information more easily accessible to those workers.
OPEGA will also work with the Maine Department of Administrative and Financial Services’ purchasing division to determine whether the state should tweak its expectations and guidance for state agencies that choose among competing groups to fund.
OPEGA will report back at its next meeting in November.
OPEGA’s report last December found CDC officials ordered the destruction of public documents. It also found a host of problems with the way the department decided which public health organizations would receive the most state funding.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
