COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The State of Ohio spent more than $4.2 million in the last fiscal year providing its 58,000 employees with cell phones.
You pay for it with your tax dollars and if they were your cell phones, you would get the best deal possible.
But NBC 4 has found state agencies are failing to take advantage of the state's purchasing power by going it alone when contracting cell phones.
So why is the state wasting the chance to save? NBC 4's Patrick Preston investigates.
The typical family of four signs up for cell phone service together to get a discount. It's basic math. But those basics are missing inside Ohio's government.
NBC 4 found State of Ohio departments and agencies do not coordinate cell phone contracts, including the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
With 32 prison facilities around the state, phone reception can be a problem, which is why the departments spends a lot of money each year with AT&T, Verizon, Alltel and Sprint/Nextel -- more than $650,000 in a recent 12-month period.
"We were able to cut about $3,600 a month off our previous cell phone bills by bundling minutes and by sharing minutes amongst our employees," said Julie Walburn, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Walburn said ODRC negotiates directly with cell phone companies for lower rates. But Walburn doesn't know if ODRC has ever shared savings with other departments or tried to lower costs further by working together.
"I can't speak to how other departments do their assessment of cell phone use and mobile technology use. I really can't," Walburn said. "I don't know what service they even use."
NBC 4 found that no single state employee oversees state cell phone use. Instead, a half-dozen employees analyze all state purchases. But according to the Department of Administrative Services, they haven't had time to address cell phone contracts.
"This is not the most efficient way of doing things to have everybody doing it on their own," Preston said.
"No, I'm not arguing that this is the most efficient way of doing things, but sometimes an inefficient way of doing things is there because that's all that you have at the moment," said Ron Sylvester, of the Department of Administrative Services.
Sylvester pointed to other cost savings:
$5.2 million consolidating computer server contracts with IBM.
$800,000 consolidating computer purchases from Hewlett-Packard.
But he said the Strickland administration is fighting a history of cost efficiencies it inherited from the previous administration and the only solution is time.
"There are dozens, if not hundreds, of areas where the state could be purchasing better, where we could be purchasing en masse as the state, rather than as 28 separate cabinet agencies or 100 some different business units. That's absolutely true, but it takes time to pull all of that together," Sylvester said.
To view the DRC's cell phone bills for each prison facility, click here.
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