In a report released yesterday, state auditors found the Board of Regents for Higher Education (BOR) to have mismanaged its implementation of a $2.7 million emergency response communications system. The auditors evaluated the period from June 30, 2021-2023.
“The system office is not properly managing the project and sometimes failed to ensure the assets were properly utilized and inventoried,” read the report. “This finding has been previously reported in the last audit report covering the fiscal years 2019 through 2020.”
Per the audit, the BOR is composed of 22 members and oversees and administers the state’s public universities. The board’s primary duties are determining statewide tuition and student fees, establishing financial aid policies, evaluating and accrediting programs and assisting in the hiring of campus presidents.
Per the audit, in June 2018, the BOR purchased $2.7 million worth of IT services for the purpose of installing equipment that would let state and local police tap into university camera feeds and walkie-talkie communications in the event of an emergency. This equipment was supposed to connect the communications and/or security cameras of the state’s 12 community colleges, four universities, Charter Oak State College (the state’s online college) and the CSCU systems office with 19 local police stations and 13 state police barracks.
The auditors found that the BOR did not enter into memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with the departments it intended to cooperate with, effectively failing to provide guidance or lay out any agreements on how the technology would be implemented or used.
“The parties did not address critical concerns, including project terms and objectives, each party’s responsibilities, equipment maintenance and terms of usage, and key contacts,” read the audit. “Furthermore, we noted numerous inaccuracies between the information in the system, the physical assets, and supporting documentation.”
The auditors reviewed seven of 48 pieces of equipment purchased. They found that six pieces were improperly tagged within BOR’s system and were “located offsite in the custody of other state agencies or police departments,” one which was tagged and listed as active in the BOR’s inventory was never received by the police department that was supposed to be using it, one was sent to a police department but was never unboxed, another was reported to be at a police department but was actually in the possession of a community college, and four were improperly assigned serial numbers in the BOR’s system.
“In the event of an emergency, police may not be able to establish a connection with college and university security camera feeds and communications equipment,” determined the auditors. “Incomplete inventory records increase the risk of undetected losses or theft of state equipment.”
The auditors recommended the BOR to “properly manage” the project by providing appropriate training to employees on the use of the technology and entering into MOUs with police departments. The BOR agreed.
“CSCU will continue to work with our vendor to ensure that their training requirements under the contract are carried out,” read their response. “Reductions in fixed asset staff contributed to the physical inventory findings. There is now a Fixed Asset Team in place for CSCU System Office whose duties include physical inventory.”
In addition to these findings, the auditors also found the BOR has failed to finish centralizing state university purchasing to its systems office (an initiative that began over 20 years ago, in 1998), failed to consistently reconcile its bank accounts and capital assets in a timely fashion, failed to properly complete dual employment forms (which allow employees to work two jobs in the same state agency) and failed to properly inventory millions of dollars worth of assets.
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