Questions AOC employees want answered

AOC employees are by and large a smart bunch who ask smart questions of their management. Sometimes those questions don’t get answered by management and occasionally they find their way to us.

Here are a few questions that found their way to us that went unanswered by management. Some of them are paraphrased a bit (and additional information might lead or follow the question in parenthesis like this to give you the whole picture)

1. (The Judicial Council was charged with coming up with rules of court that parallel public contract code, but because rules of court have been widely reported to not apply outside of the courts and are unenforced) AOC employees want to know why the rules regarding long term contracts are being trampled on and why a favored few continue to get contract after extension after contract. Mr. Hoshino, might you be able to answer why your contracting rules are continued to being trampled upon under your leadership? 
2. (Since violations of ethics are also rules of court) AOC employees want to know from Mr. Hoshino why contract managers continue to get showered with trips, vacations, lunches, rounds of golf and other freebies from contractors who receive business contracts when these are ethical violations that should be career ending? 
3. (The AOC has structured a number of contracts in a manner that permits the contractors performance based initiatives, like cash or additional follow-on no-bid contract work but AOC employees claim they are all smokescreens for the AOC to grossly overpay because these initiatives are awarded regardless of performance and managers continue to beat down employees on issues and complaints that would prevent these awards from being made) So the question to Mr. Hoshino is, are you going to look into these types of contracts and end them because there is no accountability in making performance based awards when performance sucks but contract managers beat down employee concerns and set aside complaints to ensure the awards are made? 
4. (Certain managers and supervisors have the ability to self-approve travel and abuse that self-approval to perform wholly unnecessary travel, like visiting every courthouse to boost frequent flyer miles and hoteling points that later amount to free paid vacations. The prudent route might be to have the AOC schedule and benefit from all travel air miles and hotel points to spend on other business trips) AOC employees want to know from  Martin Hoshino when he intends, if ever to clamp down on these excessive, abusive travel requests from his directors, managers and supervisors and when are people going to be held accountable for wasting public funds to line their own vacation pockets? 
5. (certain people seem to have a revolving door from AOC vendor to AOC employee and back to AOC vendor and have a tendency of steering work in a non-competitive fashion back to certain vendors or friends, because they have had a previous relationship with them.) The question to Martin Hoshino is Why, like your predecessors, do you permit certain AOC entities to continue to hire friends and former AOC vendors instead of excluding these people or the companies that they previously worked for a certain amount of time from going to work for the AOC after contracting with them? 

Mr. Hoshino, isn’t it time?