Connecticut Department of Revenue Services (DRS) officials submitted their procurement plan a year late—because DRS officials didn’t know they had to write a report, a new audit report found.
Every three years, each state agency is required to submit an agency procurement plan to the Secretary of the Office of Policy and Management (OPM), per General Statutes. This requirement was implemented at the start of 2020. The plan must include a list of every service and program the agency intends to contract for, as well as a planned procurement schedule and details on the procurement process.
The DRS was due for a report in 2023. In 2024, a full year later, DRS said it did not know it needed to submit these reports. It managed to write a report from 2024 to 2026 and send it in on Jan. 16, 2024, according to the most recent DRS report from the Auditors of Public Accounts (APA).
Consequently, “There is less assurance that the department adequately planned and competitively negotiated purchases,” the audit report found.
“We agree with this finding,” DRS wrote in a response to the finding, which was published in the audit report. “The Department was not aware of this requirement. However, the Department did not have any procurement prescribed by the legislation that required the submission of a plan to the Office of Policy and Management during the audit period.”
This is just one of ten “internal control deficiencies; instances of noncompliance with laws, regulations or policies; and… need for improvement in practices and procedures” that the audit identified. While the failure to submit an OPM was not a repeat finding, eight of the issues identified in the most recent audit report—which covered 2020 and 2021—were.
The DRS also failed to properly code funding sources to the Funds Awaiting Distribution Fund, where agencies put receipts of funds that cannot be posted to their funding source.
“We identified an account balance within the Funds Awaiting Distribution Fund that DRS did not reconcile and could not explain,” the APA wrote. “There were unresolved items in the reconciliation as far back as 2008 that the department continuously carried forward to the current period.
In addition, the department “did not submit a reconciling report at year end to the Comptroller in accordance with the State Accounting Manual.”
This was an ongoing problem that was identified in the last two audits, in 2015 and 2019.
The fund’s balance was $21.4 million, $21.2 million and $21.4 million as of June 30, in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively, according to the audit report.
“The APA should note that the journal entry to distribute these funds is out of a different account… leaving a net balance of Funds Awaiting Distribution at $1.8 million as of FYE 2023,” the DRS responded. “The Department continues to work with the Comptroller concerning the use of appropriate [accounts].”
The APA also found that the DRS did not provide documentation that it completed the Performance Assessment and Recognition Systems reviews for ten managers, it did not consult with the Sales Tax Governing Board as of Jan. 11, 2024, and there were significant gaps in the DRS’s disaster recovery plan.
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