The OC Register’s Jennifer Muir today reveals the details of an audit of County IT contracts. The practice of contracting out millions of dollars to outside companies and then failing to monitor their progress has been an ongoing problem, particularly with the County IT department. Now it looks like these guys have been monkeying around with the contracts process. I wonder if the Board will actually do anything to curb this behavior.
Here is a little bit from Jennifer’s OC Watchdog Report.
Orange County’s information technology department has spent more than $45 million over the past four years on contracts that never went out for a public bid. In nearly half of those cases administrators skipped required internal checks, in violation of county policy.
That’s according to a new internal audit of spending and management at the IT department.The audit provides a comprehensive, historical look at the cost of county information technology projects; the total is more than a half a billion dollars over the past four years.
The audit identifies 47 sole-source contracts awarded during that time. Sixteen of those were not presented to supervisors for approval — the majority because they were amounts less than the reporting threshold of $50,000.
In some cases, those companies had multiple sole source contracts with the county — some approved by the board and others not — totaling millions of dollars. In three cases, contracts totaling more than $1 million were approved without board scrutiny because they paid for leases of IT equipment or software, which don’t require board approval.
“This is extremely frustrating to me,†Supervisor Janet Nguyen said. “There needs to be some answers and there needs to be some policy changes.â€
Read the complete story here.
You need only review the campaign contributions to county supervisors and match them to the recipients of these no bid contracts for the answers.