The State’s Auditors of Public Accounts released a report yesterday painting a damning picture of the State’s Department of Correction (DOC), finding severe instances of financial mismanagement, lack of oversight over payroll and purchasing processes, frequent non-compliance with documentation requirements across multiple categories, and an overall lack of employee accountability. 

The most common recurring pattern identified by the auditors was a lack of fiscal accountability across the board. In perhaps the most egregious incident identified by the auditors, the Department of Correction was found to have paid a DOC employee who qualified for a one-time, $3,032 payment for working holidays, a total of $163,729. Instead of giving the employee their $3,032 payment once, the employee received 54 bi-weekly payments of $3,032. In response to this finding in particular, Republican Senators John Kissel (Enfield) and Stephen Harding (Brookfield) issued a statement.

“The report found a DOC employee that opted for an annual $3,032 holiday compensatory time payment erroneously received 54 bi-weekly payments totaling $163,729. DOC has acknowledged and explained the error, but that overpayment of taxpayer money must now be recovered,” read their statement. “We are interested in learning the details of how and when that significant amount of taxpayer money will be clawed back.”

The DOC responded in the report by saying the incident was the result of a budgetary employee’s retirement.

“The Agency Payroll bi-weekly checklist includes a review of payroll for Holiday Payout (HOP) coding verification and the staff involved with this error was counseled following agency discovery of the oversight,” read the DOC’s response. “In addition, our post review of processes showed a report previously run by the Budget Unit that would have captured the error was inadvertently removed from a monthly process following the manager’s retirement from the agency.”

This wasn’t the only error found in regards to holiday payments; the report found 339 work hours improperly coded as holiday time, One employee incorrectly coded 16 hours to holiday premium, a code he was ineligible for, and received an $839 overpayment. 

The DOC’s payroll issues did not stop there. The report also found the DOC to have paid out 169.25 hours in compensatory time, which is time-off awarded in lieu of overtime payment, to ten employees without proper requests or approval on file. The report studied 20 employees who received both compensatory time and overtime payments and found that 14 of these employees were found to be exempt from earning compensatory time, and seven were found to have received both compensatory time and overtime payments which totaled out to 409 hours. Another employee was found to have received eight hours of compensatory time and 6.5 hours of overtime, despite being ineligible to receive either.

“The lack of timely approval for the compensatory time earned, incorrect overtime and compensatory time earnings, and lack of employee compensatory time plan monitoring appear to be the result of inadequate managerial oversight,” read the report. “This finding has previously been reported in the last five audit reports covering the fiscal years ended June 30, 2010 through 2019.”

DOC responded by saying that its payroll staff and members of the Department of Administrative Services Human Resources department “have met to review issues and are implementing updates.”

Payroll issues extended to parole officers and even inmates. Of the ten parole officers that auditors assessed, hours recorded on officers’ accountability logs (13 of 20 of which the officers failed to complete) did not match the hours on their timesheets. There was also a lack of supporting documentation for 19 hours of compensatory time earned for three of the parole officers. As for inmates, seven working inmates had missing or incomplete compensation records, and supervisors failed to sign timesheets for nine others.

Improper documentation was another issue; the DOC found incomplete or missing workers’ compensation claims for five claims that totaled out to $347,164, discrepancies in indemnity payments for five claims resulting in one claim being underpaid to the tune of $4,069 and another four receiving a total of $2,079 in overpayment, a lack of supporting documentation for seven claims worth $206,146, and one claim which had two contradictory doctors notes without any further documentation to validate it, leading to a payment of $13,174 that was potentially in error. 

In addition, the report found missing or inadequate documentation for seven approved medical leaves, five employees approved for dual employment, and found the DOC was missing five quarters’ worth of manual overtime sign up books and four weeks worth of overtime sign-up sheets. It also found a lack of annual evaluations for three employees, all of whom received their annual raise, a lack of supporting documentation for 28,282 hours worth of union leave (with one employee racking up 3,728 hours of leave without supporting documentation or supervisor approval before retiring in June 2022). 

The DOC’s purchasing was also found to suffer from improper documentation practices. Upon analysis of 134 purchases made by the DOC on five different purchasing cards, auditors found that six purchases worth $4,451 were made by staff members other than the cardholders, and five purchases worth $4,044 were split into separate payments to circumvent purchasing limits.

“DOC did review the split purchases and determined that it was necessary due to emergency facility repair that needed to be addressed right away,” read DOC’s response. DOC also contextualized the split purchases by saying that it filed a request with the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) in February 2023 to raise the purchase limit to $2,000 “due to significantly rising costs.” DAS approved the request two weeks later. 

“DOC will continue to work with purchase cardholders to ensure they adhere to correct procedures and card usage,” read DOC’s response. “Additionally, cardholders will be reminded to reach out to DOC’s purchase card coordinator if they have any questions or concerns regarding particular transactions before utilizing their cards.”

In addition to shortcomings with purchasing, the report found a lack of proper asset management. Per state statutes, agencies are required to maintain inventories of their physical assets and property. The auditors assessed 25 newly purchased assets of the DOC, and could not locate ten of them, worth $372,826, while also finding that the DOC improperly recorded 19 newly purchased assets, worth $628,509. The auditors also reviewed 102 previously inventoried assets and failed to locate 34 of them, worth $79,983. 

The report also found that the DOC improperly recorded forty-eight assets, worth $231,623. Upon reviewing the DOC’s inventories from 2020-21, auditors found that 1,043 items, worth $676,089,645, were not dated. It also found improper processes surrounding the deletion of assets from the DOC’s inventory, finding assets disposed of without authorization and several assets removed from their inventory months or even years later. The most significant late removal was that of DOC buildings that were transferred to UConn in 2015; the buildings, worth $12,230,999, were only removed from DOC’s inventory six years later in 2021.

DOC responded by saying it “has been working to improve its processes,” and has met “with facility wardens, division directors, and their staff to review the inventory, surplus property and asset transfer process.”

In addition to their inadequate physical inventory procedures, the DOC was also found to lack proper software inventory procedures. Per state statutes, the DOC is required to maintain an inventory of any and all “licensed, owned, and agency-developed software.” The DOC had no such inventory to provide auditors, despite reporting in its 2022 annual property reports as having $21,998,210 worth of capitalized and licensed software.

In addition to all of this improper documentation, the DOC was also found to lack proper hiring and promotion documentation for seven newly hired employees and six promoted employees. The lack of hiring documentation and annual evaluations are just a small piece of a larger issue found by the auditors, which was an overall lack of staff accountability. The report found that 19 employees had not met the minimum training requirements for their positions, and 15 of them not meeting them for two years. The DOC said that COVID played a role in this, and that the issue should be alleviated going forward.

“Restrictions with the pandemic interfered with the ability to increase training hours to 16 in-service hours,” read DOC’s response. “We have been able to meet the increased needs by adding six additional training lieutenants who are able to conduct training at regional sites. They are also responsible for training rosters and tracking. This will improve the continuity of the training and documentation.”

Usage of cell phones was another area of poor employee oversight. Per state statutes, the Commissioner of Administrative Services charges the appropriations of each state agency for its phone service expense. Agency employees are then responsible for verifying the cell phone bill’s accuracy within 30 days of receiving the bill and must confirm that the phones are being used by agency staff appropriately. Upon analysis of 2,653 billing statements, the auditors found 316 statements not approved by individual cell users, and 530 not approved by supervisors, 567 statements approved late by users, another 802 approved late by supervisors, and 282 statements approved without a date.

DOC admitted that its cell phone usage issue “will continue to be a challenge as the agency has been unable to sustain its previously utilized cell phone billing system due to staffing limitations and the consolidation of statewide functions.” 

The DOC’s procedural inadequacy was also found to extend to the way in which DOC staff interacted with inmates. Per agency rules, correction staff are required to provide soon-to-be-free inmates with a Request for Account Balance (RFAB) form prior to their discharge, which allows inmates to indicate how they would like their commissary accounts to be disbursed to them once they leave. Once complete, inmates return these forms to correction staff, and the facility is supposed to forward the forms to the agency’s Fiscal Services department, which subsequently closes the inmates account and issues checks to the inmates. Any money that isn’t claimed from inmates accounts within one year of their release gets transferred to a General Welfare Fund, meant to be used for the benefit of inmates.

Auditors analyzed 30 inactive accounts, with balances totaling $137,096, and found that RFAB forms were not received by Fiscal Services for 18 of these accounts and that another 12 of the unclaimed counts had remained so for over a year without the money being transferred to the General Welfare Fund. 

Perhaps most concerning in regard to the treatment of DOC’s inmates was the finding of 239 instances in which correction staff were late to administer medication to inmates. These incidents ranged from the span of medication arriving ten minutes to nearly three hours late.

Ultimately, the auditors summed up the issues found in their report as the result of three major shortcomings by DOC staff.

“For the areas audited, we identified, deficiencies in internal controls, apparent non-compliance with laws, regulations, contracts and grant agreements, policies, or procedures and need for improvement in management practices and procedures that we deemed to be reportable,” concluded the report.

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