Report 2022-031 Recommendation 8 Responses

Report 2022-031: The State Bar of California: It Will Need a Mandatory Licensing Fee Increase in 2024 to Support Its Operations (Release Date: April 2023)

Recommendation #8 To: Bar of California, State

To ensure the cost-effectiveness of its external investigation process, the State Bar should, by October 2023, conduct in-depth audits for a selection of the external investigators' billing statements to ensure that their billed amounts are reasonable. In addition, by September 2023, it should complete its fiscal analysis to determine how much money and time is spent on external disciplinary cases from the time cases first open to when they close.

6-Month Agency Response

The State Bar completed its analysis of billing data for special deputy trial counsel (SDTC) contractors. The mixed-method analysis involved triangulating case, invoice, and contract data to examine data quality across the three sources; calculating average time and cost for closed cases; assessing the reasonableness of costs for a subset of invoices by analyzing line items; and comparing SDTC time on cases to prior analyses of Office of Chief Trial Counsel time spent on closed cases.

Staff analyzed 244 cases with matched SDTC invoices for the period February 2020 through June 2023 Results of the analysis, as well as recommendations for improvement, will be shared with the SDTC administrator to continuously monitor improve the cost- and time-effectiveness of the SDTC program. Please reference the document "SDTC Time and Cost Analysis State Audit Memo" for additional detail.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Fully Implemented

60-Day Agency Response

The State Bar is in the process of organizing and analyzing the billing data for Special Deputy Trial Counsel (SDTC) services over the past few years. The initial focus is to gather and organize invoices and payments related to SDTCs and then- aggregate the payment amounts by individual STDCs. This aggregate payment data will then be compared with the caseload assigned to each STDC, allowing for an analysis of the time and associated costs processing each case. The data regarding costs and time per case as handled by STDCs will be compared to corresponding figures for the Office of Chief Trial Counsel. This comparison, along with other pertinent data on workload and costs, will allow for an assessment of the reasonableness of SDTC costs. The project is expected to take a few months, with preliminary results expected by the end of September.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2022-031

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.