At yesterday’s hearing on the Rawlings-Blake administration’s progress toward auditing agencies, the City Council and residents called on Director of Finance Henry Raymond to be transparent and make status reports available to the public online.

The hearing was called because voters had approved a charter amendment in 2012 requiring quadrennial audits of 13 city agencies, but none has been completed – and only three are in a very preliminary stage.

None of the agencies have been audited for at least 30 years, according to Carl Stokes, chairman of the Council’s Taxation, Finance and Economic Development Committee that initiated the charter amendment.

On Wednesday, the Board of Estimates approved engagement letters for audits to start for the Finance, Recreation and Parks, and Transportation departments.

The action came over the objections of Comptroller Joan M. Pratt, who said the audits would lack “independence” because the administration, through the Finance Department, was controlling the process.

Wednesday’s action leaves 10 other audits to be finished by the end of 2016 – Fire, Police, Public Works, Housing and Community Development, Law, General Services, Planning, Human Resources, the Baltimore Development Corporation and the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology.

Raymond said the first group of audits would be complete by June 2015 – a tight schedule given that a financial review of Recreation and Parks by City Auditor Robert McCarty took nearly 18 months to complete.

A second group of audits are slated to begin on July 1, 2015, and are expected to be completed by December 2015.

“None of the audits should take more than six months to complete,” Raymond told the committee.

Raymond said that auditing of his department (Finance), which would be done by the city auditor, could take longer because it is a large department. “That one might take until September,” he said.

A third group of audits will be selected in January 2016, and those audits are to be completed by June 2016, Councilman Bill Henry, who sits on the committee, said in a follow-up email.

Decisions as to which agencies will be audited in the second or third rounds have not yet been made.

Online Documentation

Councilman Eric Costello, who was a government auditor before he took office in the 11th District last October, requested changes to Finance’s policy on implementing the audit charter amendment.

He asked the agency to identify who is responsible for performance audits and the process for defining their scope; he asked the agency to also reference its financial manual, to guide city agencies.

He further requested that Finance identify the process for determining which vendor (or city auditor) is selected to conduct each agency’s audit.

The councilman said the following documentation should be available on a city webpage: a link to the revised Department of Finance policy on implementing the charter amendment, a link to the city’s financial manual, and a schedule, regularly updated, on the progress of each audit.

Additionally, Costello asked for the final scope of each  performance audit and links to each audit, as they are completed. He also requested that audit updates from the Department of Finance be made available through the city’s check-box email alert system, which residents can subscribe to.

“We’ll take your ideas under advisement,” Raymond told Costello, and said that the audit web page would take 4-6 weeks to create.

Overtime at Police

Councilman Warren Branch (13th District) asked Raymond if the audits would go into details about city spending. “We need to be able to hold [agencies] accountable,” Branch said.

Leo Burroughs, who represents an organization called the Committee of Concerns Citizens, asked that auditors look into workers’ overtime – a high cost for the Police Department especially. He said some employees log hundreds of hours of overtime a year.

“Is it legitimate?” Burroughs questioned. “Maybe some of it is.”

Kim Trueheart, a local activist, said she was concerned about the Mayor’s Office of Human Services, which is not part of the auditing mandate, and wondered if it would ever be audited.

Homeless Funding

The office was created by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in 2010 to develop and implement an integrated system of support for vulnerable populations, including the homeless.

The office administers annually about $40 million in mostly federal aid for homeless services in Baltimore.

Last year, the agency had to return $3.76 million to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) after federal inspectors determined that funds used as part of the city’s Journey Home homeless program violated eligibility requirements or were not part of the program’s terms and conditions.

The funds had been distributed to various non profits, including St. Vincent de Paul, People Encouraging People, Jobs, Housing and Recovery (JHR), and the now-defunct Prisoner’s Aid Association.