A report issued on Feb 19 by the Office of Legislative Audits in the Department of Legislative Services for the Maryland General Assembly found that the public school district that serves schools in Prince George’s County continues to overpay employees and put hundreds of millions of dollars of resources at risk because of lax inventory control and tracking.
Honeywell/CERTs programmable thermostat giveaway, Minnesota, 2010 (CERTs/Flickr)
The report listed about two dozen problems with the district’s oversight of the money it spends on behalf of Maryland residents and US citizens. About half of the findings were repeated from an audit a few years ago.
The school district receives about $1.614 billion annually, 54 percent of which comes from the state, 38 percent from the county, and about 7 percent from the federal government. It’s the 19th largest district in the US and second largest in the state, with 123,833 students in 2012 at 197 schools and 1,146 buses.
Our audit disclosed that PGCPS needs to implement steps to improve cost effectiveness and efficiency, especially as it relates to its student bus transportation. … Since the data contained in the [bus transportation] routing system appeared to be unreliable and other manual processes were not effective, PGCPS was unable to assess bus utilization. … Average utilization of PGCPS buses during the 2010-11 school year was 48 percent of capacity.
PGCPS was unable to provide key documentation related to energy performance contracts with two vendors. For example, PGCPS could not provide schedules of project completion or document how cost savings generated by these projects would be calculated to ensure that vendor guaranteed savings of $184.4 million are achieved.
The report also said the school district had to monitor operations more closely in human resources management, information technology equipment inventory and password controls, where some employees had broader access than needed, building construction, payroll, collection of revenue from some after-school programs, and employee leave payout policies, which, the report found, may have resulted in several employees being overpaid upon their retirement.
There was some good news in the audit report, though. Food services operations in the district have seen improved controls. The district has taken positive steps, the audit report said, to reduce deficits in food-service operations at its schools.
