About $29.2 million worth of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention property was put at risk after the employees incorrectly recorded the items in the agency’s property system.
The Department of Health and Human Service’s Inspector General attempted to locate a sample of 250 items but could only find 245 in the property database, leaving the remaining five items to be marked as “missing.”
The audit also found that the missing items were not always removed from the system, leaving the cost of the CDC’s property to be overstated in the system by as much as $23.1 million.
In addition, the audit revealed that an additional 14 items with a total value of $13.1 million were incorrectly recorded.
“These deficiencies occurred because CDC personnel had made clerical errors when they manually entered costs into the property system,” the inspector general said.
The errors didn’t stop there. The audit also found that 14 of the 128 newly purchased items for fiscal 2013 were not barcoded, not recorded at all or recorded with the wrong prices.
According to the audit, the additional oversights caused the CDC to understate the cost of total property purchased for that year by about $5.9 million.
The inspector general made three suggestions to prevent future errors.
The first suggestion, which the CDC did not agree with, was that the agency “ensure that existing property is barcoded and correctly identified in the property system.”
In its response to the recommendations, the CDC said it has since implemented adequate identification measures and that “the OIG’s findings on the 2007 and 2013 inventories and the associated circumstances are not the same, making the OIG’s repeated conclusions and statistical projections unwarranted.”
The second suggestion was that the CDC ensure “that all property is added correctly to the property system, that the property system is reconciled to the general ledger, and that the property system is adjusted to resolve any discrepancies” — a suggestion the CDC “partially concurred with.”
While the health agency agreed with the first half of the suggestion that all property be correctly logged, the CDC rejected the notion of adjusting the property system, saying it already “reconciled and resolved differences for this account series in accordance with HHS Financial Reconciliation Interim Policy … prior to the 2010 report.”
The last suggestion, which the CDC did agree with, was to make sure the agency would “complete Reports of Survey within HHS’s 90-day time limit and remove property from the property system that the Reports of Survey identify as missing.”
