The Wisconsin Reporter reports:

The operation at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. apparently is so muddled that the Legislative Audit Bureau could not adequately “assess the effectiveness of WEDC’s economic development programs.”

The bureau’s audit, released Wednesday, found information WEDC submitted to the Legislature in November “did not contain all the required information, contained some inaccurate information and did not clearly present information about the number of jobs created and retained as a result of its programs.”

Auditors found it “difficult to assess the accuracy and completeness of the number of jobs that WEDC reported” because WEDC did not independently verify the information submitted by the companies that took WEDC cash or tax credits, or follow up on the 55 percent of contractually required progress reports that were never submitted. …

The audit found that internal WEDC documents show no jobs created or retained as a result of Community Development Block Grant awards, whereas WEDC’s report indicated 302 jobs created and 63 jobs retained.

The audit was so alarming that Rep. Samantha Kerkman, R-Randall, and Sen. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, co-chairs of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, called for a public hearing May 9.

That’s just the tip of the 94-page iceberg released by the audit bureau, which underline’s the quasi-public economic development corporation’s neglect of statutory requirements and internal policies in almost every facet of operation.

With the hearing tomorrow (and an emergency meeting today), I have a thought for Rep. Kerkman, Sen. Cowles and the rest of the Legislative Audit Committee: You’re looking in the wrong place.

The much bigger question is whether or not WEDC is improving the state as a place to do business. The answer depends less on WEDC than on what the Legislature does.

First: Rep. Peter Barca (D–Kenosha) claims the state needs to return to the previous Department of Commerce. The mere fact that Barca got a job with the U.S. Small Business Administration as a Band-Aid for his boo-boo of losing his Congressional seat to Mark Neumann does not make Barca qualified to pontificate on business or business climate.

More important than Democrats’ stupid political games-playing is the fact that the economic development corporation model works in this state. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be this many economic development corporations in this state. Economic development corporations employ people who know what they’re doing in economic development.

Barca’s preferred model, the Department of Commerce (and its predecessor Department of Development), was the state agency that was supposed to promote business while simultaneously regulating business. That’s not very business-friendly, but then again neither is this state. And, by the way, the Department of Commerce was the agency that watched while the state hemorrhaged jobs during the Doyle administration.

If the WEDC has problems, they need to be fixed immediately. But the problems with this state’s business climate have little to do with the WEDC and much more to do with things that have predated the WEDC.

What’s been done about the $2.2 billion Doyle tax increase? Hardly anything. (Not that Doyle should be exclusively blamed; remember when Wisconsin had the highest state and local taxes in the nation under Gov. Tommy Thompson?) Has state government been restructured to be considerably smaller and perform better? Have any state employee positions been eliminated? Have we gotten rid of any of the 3,120 units of government in this state? Has the job-killing Department of Natural Resources been reformed at all? (Ask the developers of the restaurant not far from here, whose lot remains completely undeveloped thanks to the DNR.) Has a single regulation been repealed?

The reason Wisconsin continues to perform badly in state business climate comparisons — regardless of how the issues of importance are ordered or weighted — is because nothing significant has been done to improve this state’s business climate. This may be the most regulation-happy state in the country not named California. (And because we have regulations, we have regulators, government employees who make more money and have much better benefits than those whose taxes pay those salaries and pay for those benefits.) Schools in this state are not as good as we like to think they are, which means workforce quality isn’t as good as we think it is. Businesses don’t like unions. The supposedly courageous Walker refuses to sign right-to-work legislation. Our vaunted quality of life generally matters the least, believe it or not, to businesses making location decisions.

Those are things the Legislature decides to do. The WEDC is in charge of marketing Wisconsin as a place to do business. It’s tough to do that when the product isn’t very good. The Legislature needs to improve the product WEDC is trying to market.

Remember the phrase (attributed,  possibly even accurately, to Albert Einstein) that insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results? Well, Wisconsin has been a high-tax high-regulation lots-o’-government state for at least 100 years. (That would be when the income tax started.) And our economy has been subpar for at least the last 35 years, and probably long before that. Until our approach changes, the results will continue to be mediocre at best.