Auditor general recommends Greene CYA adjust record-keeping
Greene County officials are making adjustments after the state auditor general noted several record-keeping failures by the county’s Children and Youth Services. (Photo by Ed Riedmann)
Zimmerman
The Greene County Children and Youth Services is making adjustments after the state department of Auditor General Eugene DePasquale noted several record-keeping failures in its audit of the agency’s fiscal reports and financial records for fiscal years 2010-11 through 2013-14.
The audit report, released in October, identified three specific agency record-keeping shortcomings during that four-year period.
One was a failure to provide adequate supporting documentation showing that in-home purchased services paid for were actually provided by contracted in-home purchased service providers. Another was a failure to execute written contracts with four legal service providers. The third shortcoming was a failure to perform adequate reconciliation of agency records to county records.
“These are common weaknesses that we find in our audits of (children and youth) agencies,” state Auditor General’s Office Spokesperson Susan Woods said.
The audit report made several recommendations to the agency, including expanding written invoice processing procedures for review of in-home purchased provider invoices to ensure invoiced services were actually provided, establishing procedures to ensure proper execution of written contracts with all legal service providers, and implementing procedures to begin preparing reconciliations of the agency’s financial records with related county financial records.
Greene County Children and Youth Services Acting Director Stacey Courtwright, who has been the agency’s administrator since 2013, said Monday that the agency was in the process of looking into its procedures as per the audit’s recommendations, which Greene County Commissioner Blair Zimmerman said he found satisfactory.
The agency disagreed with the report’s finding that it had failed to execute written contracts with four legal service providers, stating in the report that it always had a court order to pay for these services.
“(T)his has always been the practice and it was accepted in past reviews,” the agency said in the report. “Greene County Children and Youth Services Agency will obtain contracts for future services, but disagree with (the) finding since this was an acceptable practice in past reviews.”
The agency also disagreed with the report’s finding that it had failed to perform adequate reconciliation of agency records to county records, again saying that it will change its process as per the state auditor general’s recommendations but did not agree since it had been acceptable in past reviews.
Woods said the state auditor general’s previous audits of children and youth agencies did not include a review of controls over in-home providers, so specific risks related to in-home purchased services paid for possibly not actually being provided had not been reviewed or detected before.
Woods added that audited agencies do not commonly cite that past practices had been accepted before as a reason for disagreeing with auditor general findings.
The agency agreed with the state auditor general’s finding that the agency had failed to provide adequate supporting documentation showing that in-home purchased services paid for were actually provided by contracted in-home purchased service providers.
The state auditor general’s next audit of the agency has not yet been scheduled, Woods said.
Zimmerman said that Greene County’s commissioners will be meeting informally with Courtwright and other agency staff soon for an update on procedural approaches.
DePasquale’s audit report looks beyond Greene County by also focusing on what it says is a “faulty” interpretation of the Child Protective Services Law (CPSL) which may be putting children at risk.
That interpretation consists of merely monitoring executed provider contracts rather than actually monitoring their providers’ adherence to CPSL background check requirements, the report said, adding that children and youth agency management staffs are unsafely determining that CPSL adherence of employees and volunteers doesn’t have to be monitored since they are now including the requirements for this monitoring in their executed contracts with these providers.
“It’s been a problem for just about all (children and youth) agencies but the issuance of our observation has resulted in agencies beginning to understand related risks to children and start developing processes to monitor the CPSL adherence of the employees of in-home providers and subcontractors,” Woods said.