 |
Auditor's fraud hotline |
|
1-800-TX-AUDIT (892-8348) |
Editor's note: In recognition of Sunshine Week, Texas Watchdog is highlighting Texas heroes who have fought for greater government transparency. Learn more at www.sunshineweek.org.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct two items, the number of employees in the auditor's office and the size of its budget. Texas Watchdog regrets the error.
Less than two years after its almost nonexistent dam safety program in Texas was laid bare by the State Auditor's Office, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is on target to have inspected every one of the more than 7,600 state regulated dams by August 2011.
During roughly that same time, the Texas Department of Transportation has recovered from a $1.1 billion accounting embarrassment that backed up almost $700 million in road projects like a train wreck. In response to a review by the auditor, the department reorganized to bring the accounting and project scheduling arms together. Nearly every one of dozens of auditor's recommendations were addressed.
And this summer, when the State Department of Housing and Community Affairs was more than two years and $300 million behind in paying out to agencies helping the victims of Hurricanes Rita and Ike, the auditor asked for spending changes that have, through this past week, been addressed.
During Sunshine Week when we reflect on the work of keeping government open and accountable to the citizenry, we thought it worthwhile to look at the work the state auditor's office, an internal but independent watchdog for any department or agency that receives and spends state tax dollars. By authority of Chapter 321 of the Texas Government Code and backed by a legislative audit committee headed by the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the house, the auditor inspects and investigates in the event of fraud or other misuse of state funds.
The auditor also recommends. The roughly five dozen reports produced by an agency that employs nearly 215 people with a 2010 budget of $21.4 million include hundreds of suggestions for eliminating waste, duplication and inefficiency in state government. As dispassionate as the language is, the reports are detailed and blunt.
John Keel, state auditor for the past five years, says he rarely feels the need to comment on his office's reports because he believes they speak for themselves.
Keel, however, has no legal authority to back his reports with penalty or sanction. That is left to the discretion of the legislature. A cursory look at three high-profile reports - on dam safety, transportation accounting and hurricane funding - over the past two years, suggests the auditor has enough authority to compel important and necessary compliance.
"No one likes to be audited, but there were issues that needed to be addressed," said Warren Samuelson, the manager of the dam safety division at the state Commission on Environmental Quality. "If I had to do it again, I would."
During the 2009 legislative session, Samuelson testified before a Senate natural resources committee that had the auditor's facts at its fingertips: Seven inspectors, nearly 1,100 bridges for each inspector, almost 1,700 bridges classified as high or significant hazard.
While no one knew of bridges in imminent danger of collapse, the problem was that the inspection schedule made it impossible to know if there was imminent danger. As long as the current system existed, the auditor had said, there existed in Texas a threat to life and property.
The auditor's report played a key role in the legislature approving funding to hire nearly two dozen full-time inspectors in 2010-11 and to add $2.5 million to a division budget that had been $590,601. The auditor had called for a reorganization of virtually the entire division. Next to nearly all the 19 pages of responses to the recommendations is the word "completed."
"I'd like to think our report helped them in their modernization," Keel said.
$1.1 BILLION ACCOUNTING ERROR IN SPOTLIGHT
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and then-Speaker of the House Tom Craddick called on Keel in early 2008 to find out just what was going on with the Department of Transportation.
Lawmakers wondered how an error representing more than a quarter of the $4.2 billion TxDOT thought it had on hand to spend through 2008 could go unnoticed. That the department failed to reveal the mistake for months gave rise to suggestions that somehow $1.1 billion in road building money was missing.
Keel's report, the work of more than six months, made clear the money was not lost nor stolen but had never existed in the first place. The report did not place a precise dollar value on the cost of such an enormous mistake, but said that in addition to the $692 million in road projects that had been slowed, the department had its amount of federal highway funds reduced by $36.5 million. Not to mention the amount lost in planning by the department and contractors.
The workers who put road projects into the pipeline and those who pay for those projects didn't talk to one another, the report said. In fact, there was a systemic communication problem in the department.
With the legislature watching TxDOT, set out to change its communication culture, spokesman Chris Lippincott said.
The design division now answers to the chief financial officer, who reports to the executive director, Lippincott said. A cash flow report is made monthly to the State Transportation Commission.
Keel said the progress has been good.
"There are a lot of flashlights looking around this place, and that's a good thing. We spend about $8 billion a year of the taxpayers' money," Lippincott said. "This got a big reaction, and we took immediate action based on the auditor's report."
HOME REBUILDING PROGRAM SCRUTINIZED
In the case of the Department of Housing and Community Affairs, its immediate action - to agree with virtually everything the auditor had to say about its problems distributing federal home rebuilding funding - has been followed by fitful success. As has been demonstrated by the stimulus funding of weatherization through Housing and Community Affairs, the pipeline from federal to state to local is often disjointed.
The auditor normally gives an agency or department up to two years to carry out its detailed suggestions.
If a follow-up report is necessary, as was the case with Housing and Community Affairs, it becomes a written statement of dissatisfaction.
Like the Weatherization Assistance Program, which is aimed at making low-income homes energy-efficient, hurricane funding has been plagued by an inability in the department to distribute the money to community groups and contractors. The follow-up report said much of the problem was the months it took to establish the eligibility of the people who are still waiting for about $305 million in hurricane funds through the Community Development Block Grant program.
Spokesman Gordon Anderson said the department got help from the Legislature this past session with a legal change to help speed along the eligibility process. A review of reports filed with the auditor show a department moving on all fronts to accomplish its task.
"The department's contractors at the local level faced significant challenges in speeding up assistance," Anderson said. "We feel we have overcome all of these obstacles and have set a much faster pace for housing restoration."
Contact Mark Lisheron at 512-299-2318 or mark@texaswatchdog.org.
Like this story? Then steal it. This report by Texas Watchdog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. That means bloggers, citizen-journalists, and journalists may republish the story on their sites with attribution and a link to Texas Watchdog. If you do re-use the story, we'd love to hear about it. E-mail news@texaswatchdog.org.
Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, join our group on MySpace, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Digg, join our network on de.licio.us, and put our RSS feed in your newsreader. We're also on NewsVine, tumblr, Ning, FriendFeed and YouTube.
|
|
Comments
RSS feed
StumbleUpon
Twitter
Newsvine
Facebook
Digg
De.licio.us
YouTube
