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Then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett announcing a round of criminal charges flowing from the so-called "Bonusgate" corruption investigation of the state Legislature.

(Christine Baker, The Patriot-News/file)

Researchers have identified a way for Pennsylvania to save money on state government operations: reduce corruption.

The study that looked at the most corrupt states, of which Pennsylvania ranks fifth behind Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Illinois, and least corrupt found that government corruption costs U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year.

Reducing corruption to an "average" level would lower annual state spending by $1,308 a person, according to the study by Indiana University professor John Mikesell and City University of Hong Kong assistant professor Cheol Liu.

Take that $1,308 times the state's 12.7 million residents and you are talking about a potential for significant savings.

"Policy makers should pay close attention that public resources are not used for private gains of the few but rather distributed effectively and fairly for various purposes," the researchers state in the conclusion of the report that is said to be the first study to look at the impact of public officials' corruption on state spending.

Attempts to contact Mikesell about his research were unsuccessful Wednesday.

The report suggests the link between increased spending and corruption grows, in part, out of corrupt public officials having a strong incentive to create a fiscal illusion to hide their wrongdoing. In doing so, they can create excessive spending.

Sen. Mike Folmer, R-Lebanon County, after seeing media coverage of the report, admits, "It's a problem. No doubt about that. It doesn't look good and that's a shame."

The research relies on data from the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice that defines public corruption as being "crimes involving abuses of the public trust by government officials."

Researchers looked at more than 25,000 public convictions of violations of federal anti-corruption laws for each state between 1976 and 2008 and compared that with the number of government employees to create a "corruption index."

Using that index, the study found that the sixth through 10th most corrupt states are: Alabama, Alaska, South Dakota, Kentucky and Florida. On the other end of the scale, the 10 least corrupt states were Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa, Vermont, Utah, New Hampshire, Colorado and Kansas.

It is unclear which officials who were convicted on federal public corruption charges in Pennsylvania were counted in the Justice Department data, but the convictions of former Sens. Vincent Fumo and Robert Mellow — two of the more familiar names of individuals who were convicted on federal charges — both occurred after 2008.

But if only federal convictions were counted, that leaves out the number of government officials who were convicted of corruption on the state or county level during the 1976 to 2008 span including former state lawmakers Mike Veon, Bill DeWeese, John Perzel and Jane Orie, and former Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie, among others.

Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, said the study verifies what his organization has been highlighting for decades — paying back campaign donors, cronies, and those providing regular and significant gifts to elected officials cost the taxpayers real money.

"It costs in terms of inflated contracts, privileged treatment in laws, law enforcement, and regulation, special provisions in laws that favor the benefactor including tax deductions and exemptions, plus investigations and prosecutions," Kauffman said. "Taxpayers end up paying a very high price for corruption."

Other trends that researchers noted in their study that occur in the more corrupt states are they: