It's widely known that Pennsylvania has one of the largest — and most expensive — state legislatures in the nation. What's less well-known is that the state's General Assembly also employs more staffers to support lawmakers than other states.

An explanation for that fact might be emerging in the corruption and conflict-of-interest trial of former state Rep. Mike Veon. The case, known as Bonusgate, is in its fourth week in Harrisburg.

Patrick Lavelle, a former legislative aide, testified last week in the Veon trial that he spent about 80 percent of his time on fundraising for political campaigns. Lavelle noted that fundraising work ended in 2007, once the state Attorney General's office began its investigation into news reports that large taxpayer-funded bonuses were awarded to staffers for their campaign work.

Another former staffer, Mike Manzo, testified that he talked regularly with Veon about campaign issues and that efforts in 2004 to challenge the nomination petitions of independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader were hatched on state time and manned by legislative staff members.

Manzo said that a dozen staffers worked on scrutinizing the petitions inside the Capitol. The effort, motivated by Democrats' fears that Nader would pull votes from nominee John Kerry, was successful in knocking Nader off the ballot.

Another former Democratic House staffer, Karen Steiner Blanar, testified last week that campaign efforts inside Veon's office were commonplace and included fundraising calls and handling mass mailings. Blanar said that for the two years she worked in Veon's office, the machine that folds mailings was running nearly nonstop producing campaign mailings.

Yet another former staffer, Jeff Foreman, testified that he also did political work while on the state payroll. Foreman said he "mixed political work, legal work (for his private law firm) and legislative work from the beginning."

The revelations from former staffers regarding the amount of campaign work performed while on the clock for the state, and paid by state taxpayers, might explain why Pennsylvania's legislature has more staffers than other state governments.

According to a report by the Pennsylvania Economy League, the state "ranks high on staff-to-population and staff-to-legislator ratios. When compared with the state's population, Pennsylvania has the highest ratio of the 13 big states."

In testimony Monday, Blanar said about half her time over a two-year period was spent on campaign work in Veon's office. She also explained that in early 2007, when news broke about the millions paid for campaign-related bonuses, another legislative staffer gave her help deleting incriminating e-mails from, her computer. Copies of those e-mails were saved to a compact disc, which Blanar later provided to state investigators.

If testimony from former aides is to be believed, a fair amount of many staffers' time was spent on campaign and purely political work — which is illegal. Clearly, sending campaign e-mails, handling mass mailings, doing opposition research and coordinating door-to-door canvassing should be done by campaign workers who are paid from campaign funds, not taxpayer money.

In another recent high-profile corruption trial, taxpayers learned that former state Sen. Vincent Fumo, D-Philadelphia, had staffers doing work that benefited him personally, such as managing the renovation of his mansion and supervising work on his Harrisburg-area farm, as well as shoveling his sidewalks and dropping his laundry at the dry cleaners.

Given these reports of staffers redirected by powerful lawmakers, it seems that a performance audit of all legislative staffers is warranted to determine how much work is done for constituents and how much is done to benefit political parties or lawmakers themselves.

And if testimony in the Veon trial represents nothing more than a rogue lawmaker's apparent abuse of state resources, including staff, then the trial can serve as a warning to others and help Harrisburg become more efficient — and less costly to taxpayers — by adhering to a strict prohibition against doing campaign work while being paid by taxpayers.