The District government still has no reliable inventory of its telephone lines and is paying for some 7,000 active lines it doesn’t use, a new report finds, despite multiple audits over nearly a decade detailing the same problem.
A recent audit by the D.C. Inspector General reiterates previous findings dating back to 1998, that not knowing the volume of telecommunications lines affects budget development “and could possibly result in payment for unused lines.”
“Payments have been made for telecommunications lines that were either not needed or not known to exist,” according to the report, though it does not delve into how much money the District has lost over time.
As of the summer, the District was paying for roughly 7,000 active but unused lines, according to a report produced by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and cited by the inspector general.
At Fire and Emergency Services, said the inspector general, three active phone lines were discovered in an engine house that had been abandoned for 12 years. During those 12 years, the IG wrote, “payments were made to the vendor for those lines because no one at the agency knew of their existence.”
Another 79 “unneeded” data lines, at $40 per month each, were discovered at FEMS, and “no one knows how long these lines had been unused,” the IG wrote. Across agencies, many of the unneeded lines may have been activated for short-term purposes, a special event perhaps, and never shut down.
The inspector general came to the same conclusion in 2006 as it did in a 1998 report, when auditors discovered “9,000 unutilized telephone lines that are being paid for by the District costing approximately $1.8 million per year.”
The Office of Finance and Resource Management, which recently took over responsibility for managing the government’s telecommunications stock, is building a database to address inventory management, according to the written response from the chief financial officer. The new system could be in place by the end of the year.
