Gov. Martin O?Malley and state Democratic leaders keep saying there is no room to trim the state budget. What to make then of the latest audit of Morgan State University by the legislature?s own Office of Legislative Audits?
The audit found Morgan State misrepresented $3.1 million of a $4.3 million request from the Board of Public Works to fund a telecommunications upgrade. The Baltimore City school used the majority of the money to pay for completely unrelated projects by the same contractor ? locally based Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. The audit also found that up to $2.4 million was paid to the company “for charges that were not verified or supported, for equipment and services that were never received, and for duplicate items.” Auditors notified the attorney general of those items for criminal investigation.
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This is among a host of other problems the audit found, including that the majority-black school did not meet its minority-business enterprise goals on three construction projects.
The audit raises a host of questions, chief among them ? why did the Board of Public Works approve a contract where the majority of costs were not defined? Is this what watching out for taxpayers means?
Second, the audit reveals a void of leadership at Morgan State University that extends beyond the director of design and construction, who resigned, according to the school. Where were Abraham Moore, vice president of finance and management, and ultimately, Earl S. Richardson, president of the university? The sheer incompetence in overseeing the project begs the question of whether school staff did anything more than rubber-stamp Whiting-Turning invoices.
Third, auditors did not accuse Whiting-Turner of wrongdoing, but the report reveals the company knew how to adeptly break up its bids and invoices to avoid scrutiny by the Board of Public Works and that it has not yet repaid overpayments on the part of Morgan. The company declined to comment on the audit.
If the audit?s findings prove true, it begs the question of whether all city contracts with the company should be audited. The comptroller?s office did not return phone calls seeking information on the number and amount of contracts the private company, with sales of $3.34 billion and 1,900 employees in 2006 according to research firm Hoover?s, has won from the city in recent years. It is part of a team that expressed interest in building a new arena in the city to the Baltimore Development Corp. and won a contract with Johns Hopkins University to build a 202,350-square-foot research and eye surgery center at the school?s East Baltimore campus.
What?s clear is that no private company would ? or could ? tolerate such negligence if it expected to stay in business. To start, Morgan State must repay to those who write tuition checks to it ? students and their parents ? and to those who help to fund its capital projects ? state taxpayers ? any money found to have been misappropriated in the construction project(s).
The bigger problem may reside with the Board of Public Works, however. How many other contracts has it approved without first requiring a detailed accounting of how money will be used? Before legislators say there is no money to be saved in the state budget they should cull through contracts over the past five years and start using their office?s audits as a guide to identify waste and fraud.
