Somewhere in the state of Texas, a $718,000 Mitel SX2000 telephone system belonging to the state Health and Human Services Commission has gone missing. Just how does one lose an entire telephone system?
The answer is one doesn't, really. Or sometimes one does. There are almost as many explanations for why the phone system and 5,158 other items are on the Comptroller's list of lost and stolen state property as there are items.
Shotguns, ion guns, light beam splitters, pickup trucks, 11 crystal lasers and more than 1,500 laptop computers. More than $18 million worth of stuff that would seem to be impossible to lose. It's one thing to lose your cesium frequency synthesizer, making it impossible for you to do any sort of precision optical spectroscopy, but what if you need to smack around a few gas molecules and you've misplaced your turbomolecular drag pump?
For all of the different stories, and each department must be prepared to explain each item, there is just one reason why all of the items make this list.
"The state is diligent in being accountable for assets under management and tracking missing property," R.J. DeSilva, a spokesman for the comptroller said.
The comptroller requires each of the state's 82 public agencies and institutions of higher learning to keep track of everything purchased with tax money. This total inventory was most recently valued at $2,341,862,499 by the Comptroller. Every year, every agency is required to take a new inventory, and if for any reason an item cannot be accounted for, it is included in the lost and stolen property report.
Agencies must keep their ratio of lost and stolen item value to no more than 1 percent of the total value of all their assets or risk having their budgets reduced, although all agencies have been meeting an industry standard calculated by the American Society for Testing and Materials, DeSilva said.
While taxpayers might blanch at the loss of $18 million in property they paid for, the overwhelming number of those 5,159 items are so old at the time they are reported lost, they have an appraised value of nothing. The appraised value of that $18 million is actually $1.2 million, according to DeSilva.
Take the phone system, reported missing in September of 2008 by the Health and Human Services Commission. In that year, the commission contracted to upgrade a phone system. The old Mitel SX 2000 was moved to a basement, according to spokeswoman Stephanie Goodman.
When it came time to report on the old system, the commission's facilities people put in writing where the old system was, but entered the wrong code for its status. For the past two years a telephone system with no value has headed the list of lost and stolen property based on its original value.
Much more common, Goodman said, are items the commission reports either because an employee has moved to a new location and didn't complete the inventory relocation paperwork or because an item has gone into storage.
Every year Fred Friedrich greets with resignation the calls from reporters asking about some exotic missing item, like the Brewer Science system that was originally $80,000 or the spectrum analyzer that was $44,000 when it was brand-new. Friedrich is the controller for the University of Texas-Austin, who oversees an inventory with an assessed value of $177 million, or nearly nine times the $20 million inventory of Health and Human Services.
As many as 100 state employees take at least some role in trying to keep track of more than 100,000 items. Friedrich is always polite and patient when trying to explain that trying to know where everything is at one time is a bit like trying to gather up an ounce of mercury spilled onto a polished kitchen floor.
Friedrich cannot say with precision how many of the items he reports lost are really lost, but he is certain that nearly all of them, like the research equipment and laptops, are misplaced because they have been moved to a different room or building or have been put into storage. While it is important for accounting reasons to keep track of inventory, a definitive accounting every year would probably cost taxpayers more than the $85,841 depreciated value of the 1,362 items Friedrich can't put his fingers on at this very moment.
"Clearly, we want to be good custodians of public assets," Friedrich said, "but locating every one of them would change our mission from education and research to asset finding."
Compared to the long list of lost items, there were 585 items stolen, and just 29 of them with a value of $16,398 attributed to the negligence of an employee, according to the Comptroller's report. Insurance makes up for almost all of those losses. More than half of the negligent losses were laptops, eight were firearms and two cameras were stolen.
Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, said the four handguns and one rifle reported stolen last year were taken in break-ins of officers' squad or personal cars. Another handgun was taken in 2008 from the locked car of an off-duty UT police officer assigned to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, according to Anderson spokeswoman Julie Penne.
The Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University is missing a $30,000 diesel truck, after a team of transportation researchers doing work in El Paso in May of 2009 spent the night in a motel and came out the next morning to find it gone, Joe Dunn, director of financial reporting for the institute, said.
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