PROVIDENCE — Moments before his committee was to resume its public inquiry into the Carcieri administration’s purchasing practices, the Senate’s government-oversight chairman, J. Michael Lenihan, got a telephone call.

It was the governor himself calling, according to Lenihan, to convey “a concern and a dissatisfaction with what he was being told was an inordinate demand placed on the Department of Administration and division of purchasing for information.”

Lenihan, D-East Greenwich, said Governor Carcieri’s April 9 call caught him by surprise.

“He asked why do you need all of this information down to this detail, down to purchases of $5,000 or less? What is it you are driving at? Where are you going with this? He did say, I will give you anything that you need, but then he went on to protest the level of work that was being placed on his administration.”

Lenihan said he assured the governor he is “a reasonable person,” willing to set priorities on which documents his committee would like to see first. The personal telephone calls that Carcieri placed that day to both Lenihan and Senate President Joseph A. Montalbano illuminate an unusual tug of war between the Carcieri administration and the Senate investigating committee over state contracting and spending records.

Days before Carcieri’s phone calls, his chief of staff, Brian S. Stern, sent key personnel in the Department of Administration this e-mail: “The governor will be contacting the Senate president about this request … Please hold off responding to the committee until you hear back from this office.”

A spokesman for Governor Carcieri said the e-mail — and the calls — were aimed at finding a middle ground that did not “interfere” with the operation of government.

“The idea here is pretty simple,” said Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal, “to fulfill the Senate’s requests in an orderly fashion that does not impose unmanageable strains on individual state departments. We want to keep state government running while also responding fully to the Senate’s requests.”

The inquiry that began in early February soon led to allegations by the state Democratic Party chairman and high-level Democratic lawmakers that the administration has been using a temporary employment agency — first DataLogic Consulting and now Smart Staffing Service — to evade job-posting and affirmative-action requirements, hiring caps and wage restraints in the hiring of hundreds of state-paid workers.

Top officials in the Carcieri administration hail the use of such contract employees as a way to fill short-term staffing needs, or engage workers for time-limited projects without making them full-time employees entitled to the full roster of health, pension, sick-time and vacation benefits.

Smart Staffing was paid $451,190, including a 22.5-percent premium, to supply 293 state workers — including the chief financial officer at the state Department of Transportation — during a recent two-week pay period.

The Foxboro-based company, which had little more than a “dwindling” nurse staffing business in Rhode Island before, was given a no-bid, emergency contract worth between $7 million and $11 million annually by the Carcieri administration on Sept. 26, 2006, only four days after registering to do business in Rhode Island, and little more than a week after its predecessor notified the state it would not be able to make payroll. Smart Staffing is not the only private company supplying state workers. Others include: Maria’s Translations, Allied Court Reporters, Capitol Court Reporting, Flagship Staffing Services, RI Temps and Westaff at an additional cost of $5.5 million so far this year.

The Senate’s inquiry has since extended into other arenas, such as single-source purchasing: for example, when the administration declares there is only one qualified source for an item, such as a military-use radio.

How often has this no-bid rule been invoked? “It is not possible for the purchasing staff to reproduce the documents specified from the beginning of FY2002 to the present time without significant impairment to conducting critical purchasing function,” Department of Administration Director Beverly Najarian wrote Lenihan. “To date, we have expended 62 hours reproducing 3,000 pages that represent single-source for FY 2006 only.”

The committee has received some records and is waiting for more.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL, meanwhile, filed a written request for information about the extent to which the Carcieri administration has used private employment agencies to staff state government.

On March 8, The Journal asked, in writing, for the names, original date of hire, annual earnings and other basic employment details — readily available for full-fledged state employees — for all private-agency-employed state workers, including those working for Smart Staffing and its predecessor, DataLogic.

The Journal also sought “access to the contracts under which they were hired, and any RFPs, bids, job descriptions and job-postings that relate to their hiring.”

The deadline for responding came and went last week without a denial — or any other formal explanation for the administration’s failure to provide much of the requested information.

Some information was provided, including a current roster of Smart Staffing employees working for the state, but not annual earnings, dates of hire and other key information — such as the names of those who had previously worked for DataLogic — that would demonstrate the extent to which the Carcieri administration has relied, since 2003, on privately employed “temps” to staff state government.

Questions that remain unanswered include: How many privately employed workers are currently working in state government? How long have these so-called “temps” been on the state payroll? At what cost?

Another big unanswered question: Did the Carcieri administration ever rebid or, in some other way, legally extend to other state agencies the contract the former Almond administration gave DataLogic Consulting, in June 2002, to supply temporary employees to the Department of Health alone?

Asked why the administration did not respond within the maximum 30 business days the state’s Open Records Law allows, the governor’s deputy legal counsel, Claire Richards, said, in effect, there is no clear obligation to respond if a public agency doesn’t have the requested information readily at hand.

“The question that was asked of me was what is an agency’s responsibility when they do not have documents,” Richards said. Her answer: “Under the Access to Public Records Act, government agencies are responsible for producing documents in their care custody and control … The law does not speak to situations where you do not have documents.”

The Providence Journal filed a formal complaint Friday over the administration’s response with the attorney general’s office.

James Lee, head of the attorney general’s civil division, said he had never before heard the argument that no response was required to a public records request. But he declined further comment because of the pending complaint.

The administration belatedly did provide the newspaper last week with a summary of how much DataLogic was paid by the state between 2003-06 when it missed a state payroll, collapsed financially and the state replaced it — without formal bidding — with Smart Staffing, which had what its owner described as a “dwindling” nurse staffing business.

In fiscal 2003, which encompassed the last six months of the Almond administration and the first six months of the Carcieri administration, the state paid DataLogic $4.6 million. State payments to the company hit $10,285,979 in 2004, $11.4 million in 2005 and $11.2 million in the last full year of its contract.

But Department of Administration director Najarian and top aide James Pitassi said the state doesn’t know — and cannot reconstruct — how many privately employed workers it had scattered through state government then or now.

“We do not have a method to extract number of employees electronically,” she wrote The Journal. The Senate fiscal office produced monthly reports, dating to July 2005, that contained the names, job titles and earnings of DataLogic employees and others working for the state under the auspices of other private agencies. Senate staffers said the monthly reports came from the Department of Administration.

Asked why the agency now says it has no such information, Pitassi said: “I think there’s some confusion. They received those from me … We got them through the vendor. Okay? The vendor gave us the information because the Senate wanted it,” but “we don’t retain any of this information,” he said

Asked the legal basis for extending DataLogic’s contract with the Department of Health to other state agencies, the Carcieri administration late Wednesday produced a May 7, 2002 memorandum from then-Administration Director Robert L. Carl Jr.

In it, Carl expressed concern that “the strategy of extending or renewing the same contract employee, in some instances for multiple fiscal years, could place the state at risk for financial liability.” The fear: longtime contract employees might successfully sue for status as full-time state employees with benefits.

He said the purchasing division would be “working with some departments to develop procedures for hiring temporary employees through employment agencies or parent companies.”

Asked what subsequently happened that enabled the Carcieri administration to turn the Department of Health staffing contract — capped at $10 million over five years — into an $11-million-a-year relationship with DataLogic and now, Smart Staffing, Najarian wrote: “At this point, the change order extending the DOH contract has not been located.”

ASKED FRIDAY to describe the April 9 call he received from Carcieri, Senate president Montalbano said “I’m not going to get into a private discussion I had with the governor.”

But Montalbano said he neither gave Lenihan instructions nor expressed concerns over the committee’s inquiries after speaking with the governor. And he labeled the committee’s inquiries important, saying: “Across the spectrum of the Department of Administration, we’re talking about millions of dollars of state expenditures. We want to look to see if that’s the most efficient way to run state government.”

“My fiscal adviser and my committee chairman and some of the members are very diligent about pursuing this line of questioning … and I support that fully.”

On Wednesday, Stern lifted his three-week-old ban on cooperating with the Senate investigating committee.

In a new e-mail, he wrote: “A couple of weeks ago, I informed you that the governor had asked that you hold off on your response to Senate pending telephone calls with the Senate president and Comm. Chair. These calls have taken place and your staff can provide the responses.”

But Lenihan read what followed in Stern’s latest e-mail as something short of an unqualified go-ahead to cooperate.

“This is my reading,” he said: “You are free to go ahead and respond to the Senate requests, but your responses should be limited and be provided in ‘due course,’ whatever that means, ‘so as not to affect your department’s critical functions.’ ”

With reports from Elizabeth Gudrais.

kgregg@projo.com