If it ain't broke, don't fix it, the adage goes. But the message to Wednesday's meeting of the Business and Labor Committee: "This thing is broke," said Joe Tesch, chief deputy attorney general. "There's almost chaos in this area."
What needs fixing is the state Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing, which is responsible for regulating 49 different occupations. Officials say language regulating those professions is a patchwork of contradictory and confusing laws and regulations that has made the division a laughingstock in the courts and among the professionals being licensed.The Legislature is considering a massive restructuring of the Occupational and Professional Licensing Act to give the division clearer control over regulation of professionals.
It may seem a simple request, but according to witnesses before the Business and Labor Committee the division has been repeatedly frustrated in its attempts to discipline individuals who have violated ethic and legal standards set by the division.
Tesch cited three cases in particular:
- The division says two Provo dentists were causing permanent damage to patients. Yet three years later, the case still languishes in the court system, which refuses to allow the division to proceed.
- The division has documented dozens of cases of women who say a West Jordan doctor sexually abused them. Yet the courts have stopped the state from taking any action to revoke the doctor's license, and the doctor still practices medicine.
- The division, after a hearing that determined an Ogden doctor was "causing permanent disfigurement" of patients, tried to stop the doctor from practicing medicine. The doctor went to court, and the state was denied even a court hearing in its attempts to prohibit the doctor from further practice pending a license hearing.
"The courts are not giving us respect," Tesch said. "The statutes are inconsistent, and the people being licensed are confused."
Tesch added that the best people to regulate the profession are the professionals themselves. Under Utah licensing laws, the licensing boards are made up of professionals themselves, and the standards imposed are usually the standards imposed by the profession itself.
Several witnesses, many of them victims of unscrupulous professionals, testified before lawmakers that the current laws don't work, and that the state has done little with the laws already on the books.
"You're not doing anything with the power you already have," said Debra Norris, a victim of a Utah doctor who flew in from Tennessee to testify at the hearing. "It is the responsibility of a licensing board to protect people, and that isn't happening."
D.J. Jones, spokesman for a citizens group that has been protesting in front of a West Jordan doctor's office, presented lawmakers with petitions from about 400 people, many of them victims of sexual abuse. The state has been repeatedly frustrated in its attempts to discipline the doctor in question.
"Please do something about it," Jones pleaded.
Lawmakers will resume the debate on the bill at their July meeting.