A newly released review of the State Comptroller’s office back when Nancy Wyman was the Comptroller found that 12 out of 40 million-dollar-plus purchase orders were not approved in a required pre-auditing process. Eight were ruled to be exempt and were neither reviewed nor approved, but the State Auditors of Public Accounts could found no documents supporting grounds for exemptions. And six of ten purchase orders were approved “after the purchase order was already executed.”
Section 4-98 of the General Statutes: “Each state agency issuing any purchase order of $1,000,000 or more must forward the purchase order and all supporting documentation to the Office of the State Comptroller’s Accounts Payable Division” and Comptroller’s memorandum 2004-06 states “Effective February 17, 2004, The Office of the State Comptroller, Accounts Payable Division, will perform a pre-audit of all purchase orders of $1 Million or more.”
It also states, “Payments will not be processed until the completion of such audit and the approval of the purchase order is granted.”
“Effect: The Office of the State Comptroller is not in compliance with the established guidelines and policies for pre-approving purchase orders totaling one million dollars or more. Also, payments are being processed without the proper approvals from the Comptroller. Cause: During the last fiscal year under audit, the Accounts Payable Division lost valuable staff members due to retirements; therefore it did not have adequate staff to follow up with agencies that did not voluntarily submit the purchase orders for pre-audit. For the first two fiscal years under audit, we were unable to determine the cause for noncompliance. There are no repercussions for agencies that are not in compliance with these policies, and no controls in Core-CT to prevent unaudited purchase orders from being executed…Today, an accounting system enhancement in a recent software upgrade will allow the Accounts Payable Division, with the Core-CT Financial Team to develop and implement a system control. This functionality will require OSC approval of all requisitions and purchase orders with an encumbered amount of $1 million or more. Additionally, a separate internal accounting control developed outside the system will identify purchase orders with encumbrances of less than a million and an obligated amount of $1 million or more. These two measures will preclude agency users from issuing or transacting against purchase orders without prior OSC approval.”
The Blogster is informed that proper review procedures are now back in place under Kevin Lembo.