We all like to think that police and sheriff departments are free from fraud, but in Maryland's Montgomery County (Annapolis), the County Inspector General (we don't have one in Lake County) found that questionable training programs for Sheriff and police employees cost the County $600,000 because they avoided central procurement systems and were issued without bid to companies that "had ties" to county police officers.
As described in the Washington Post article below, it seemed the connected training firms enticed police and sheriff employees to sign up for courses of questionable quality by offering 80% or so off on brand name handguns like Glocks (see pictures), and then
billed the county for invoices up to $59,000. But, I assume the training was also on employee time, so the cost was both time and the invoiced cost.
This is the type of thing that can happen in ANY type of department, but here, it was the police and sheriff employees that incurred the questionable charges. Fortunately, the poor training programs were "outed" by the local Sheriff, which then resulted in an investigation by the Inspector General.
We don't have an inspector general in Lake County. The "County Auditor" does not have authority to initiate performance or other types of audits of the County Administration or the Constitutional Officers, including the Lake County Sheriff, without a request from them. So, even if the Auditor read this article below, and wanted to verify that the same situation did not occur in Lake County, he cannot do so without permission of the County Sheriff, or the head of any other department that needed a review. And, magically, they have not requested any performance audits either to evaluate efficiency, effectiveness and economy of operations.
The Lake County Sheriff has never requested a performance audit of spending or other operations to be performed by the "County Auditor" staff that reports to Neal Kelly, County Clerk of the Courts.
Additionally, in my experience, many government "training programs", including full degrees, are to obtain a certificate to get promotions, and if not monitored, they may be of sub-standard quality compared to professional training expected by more perceptive employers, and yet employees get promotions.
The same problem could exist by hiring employees with bogus or poor quality degrees to meet a requirement. For instance, the Federal Government has a master list of all accredited colleges, and if an applicant's "degree" is not from one of the colleges on the list, and cannot be verified, they will not be hired. For instance, we know of one local government employee in Lake County who has a "masters" degree in business, but it is from an online college that has not ONE accreditation for business programs and would not be recognized by many hiring corporations. We don't know if their employer even set standards for the degree or investigated its merit. (Or, to be fair, it might not have been a requirement for the position.)
Additionally, many years ago, I sat on accounting applicant interview boards for the County of Los Angeles, and our department excluded bogus degrees from foreign countries and "paper" degrees - many could not be verified either. It was NOT uncommon to have five foreign applicants out of 40 accounting applicants have the exact same degree from Egypt, but not understand accounting concepts. But, other departments did not verify such degrees and many employees of questionable education were hired in some departments.There really was one such department that had over 40 "degreed accountants" (now they would have two people and a personal computer) where half did not speak english and did not understand accounting.
Another issue here is that the training programs made payments "around" the standard procurement process, thus avoided normal purchasing and bid procedures. This happens in many departments, usually causing fiscal fiascos later. For instance, a marketing program at a car manufacturer paid out marketing incentive awards to dealers, and payments were authorized by a badly written software program and neither the controller or purchasing department was involved, since it was a budgeted marketing program. Then we found $12-million in duplicate payments. In another case, a race car subsidiary managed their own accounting, and the "controller" came from a savings & loan, and she didn't understand cost accounting. Then they built up an "inventory value" of $24-million on the balance sheet of race car parts, and all of them were obsolete and had to be written off. Because of that stupid mistake, the parent company shut down the entire subsidiary due to the loss on the balance sheet, and all 125 employees lost their jobs. That could have been prevented if the main Controller's department supervised the accounting system, and ensured that all spending was properly justified but they did not. Thus audits usually are needed just to identify ANY payments going out from accounting that are circumventing standard purchase controls and are outside the Controller and the Procurement department.
It may be time for the Lake County Sheriff and other County Constitutional Agencies to request a full performance audit of operational efficiency, and identify any payments made that are not processed through standard purchasing and accounting systems. They should also review the quality of external training programs, just to ensure there are no surprise problems that exist like in Montgomery County, MD.
I will be watching for any pink Glocks!
vj
from the Maryland Politics section of the online Washington Post HERE.
Montgomery Inspector General's report faults oversight in tuition program
Montgomery County awarded more than $600,000 in no-bid payments to nine companies that had ties to county police officers and were part of controversial tuition assistance program, Montgomery's inspector general said in a report released Monday.
The government provided little oversight over the training, and in many cases appeared to simply respond to invoices by cutting checks as large as $59,800, according the report. The lack of controls enabled 216 county employees -- police officers, sheriff's deputies and corrections officers -- to take county-funded classes and, at the end of the classes, purchase deeply discounted guns that one official has called the "candy" to get them to enroll in the classes in the first place.
The close ties among the companies and the employees, the inspector general concluded, "has and will continue to expose county taxpayer dollars to waste and abuse until comprehensive guidelines and monitoring are put in place."
Problems in the tuition assistance program initially were uncovered by Montgomery County Sheriff Raymond M. Kight in July. Two deputies reported that they'd been to a two-day firearms training class and that its chief virtue was the great deal they could get on a handgun -- $99 for a Glock valued at several times that, Kight said.
Kight reported his findings to the county agency that runs the program, the Office of Human Resources. The county itself launched an investigation. So did the inspector general, Thomas J. Dagley, who earlier clashed with that same agency over the county's troubled police officer disability program.
Dagley released his findings Monday afternoon. He drew three conclusions:
- Lack of management oversight and inadequate internal controls enabled county law enforcement officers to purchase pistols and rifles for personal use that appear to have been subsidized with county funds.
- Management didn't monitor whether law enforcement officers took training classes while being paid for duty.
- County government departments and its Ethics Commission haven't taken enough action to ensure that employees and training companies are in compliance with ethics, personnel and procurement regulations.
The county government administration, in a response to the inspector general's findings that were included in his report, took exception to his conclusions or said it was already addressing the issues.
The administration has acknowledged the discounted guns may have been subsidized by tuition assistance funds. But that was because a key company in question -- Applied Sciences for Public Safety -- deceived and defrauded the county into allowing it to happen, wrote Timothy Firestine, a top aide to County Executive Isiah Leggett (D).
Even so, Firestine wrote, the county has strengthened its internal controls and management oversight of the program.
The county has filed a fraud lawsuit against Applied Sciences, seeking $400,800 in compensatory damages. The county administration said it is examining whether police officers took training classes while being paid, and the Police Department itself has been doing so since last year.
Firestine said that moneys paid to the companies don't fall within the county's procurement system.
"In essence, TAP (Tuition Assistance Program) is a type of compensation to employees and the employee decides whether to access this fringe benefit. TAP funds that are used for a degree program are taxable income to the employee. TAP funds that are used for non-degree programs that are job-related are a non-taxable fringe benefit to the employee. Hence, the TAP Program is far removed from the county's procurement system, which governs the acquisition of service, goods and construction, by the county."
-- Dan Morse and Michael Laris
By Christopher Dean Hopkins | March 8, 2010; 5:12 PM ETCategories: Montgomery County , Michael Laris
