(The Center Square) – The heads of the legislature’s audit committee are again asking how Wisconsin’s Department of Health Service spent millions of dollars in coronavirus aid.
The Joint Legislative Audit Committee met at the Capitol on Tuesday to press DHS about an audit from May that found the agency lost millions of dollars and misplaced at least six of the ventilators bought during the early days of the outbreak.
“We’re seeing a trend of departments failing to provide proper checks and oversight while administering state programs. In the Department of Health Services’ case, the result is millions of taxpayer dollars being lost and hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially misappropriated,” Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Green Bay, said Tuesday.
The May audit questioned about a third of the grants auditors looked at from the Provider Payment program.
“ From March 2020 through June 2022, DHS awarded $159.6 million in program grants to 1,431 long-term health care and emergency medical services providers,” the audit found. “We found that DHS did not specify the types of documentation applicants were required to maintain in order to support their requested amounts, did not establish written policies for reviewing the amounts requested by grant applicants, and awarded $201,000 to adult family homes that it had determined did not submit sufficient documentation to support their requested amounts.”
Wimberger and Rep. Bob Wittke, R-Racine, said the “audits have shown departments are making major decisions without any written policies, giving away funding through grants or projects without verifying taxpayers are actually getting what they paid for.”
The DHS audit also dinged the agency for how it spent and tracked $38.7 million on over 1,500 ventilators between 2020 and 2022.
“We found that DHS did not execute loan agreements with all entities to which it deployed ventilators and did not inventory the ventilator-related equipment it had purchased,” the audit stated. “Six ventilators, with a combined value of $122,300, were missing as of January 2023. We also found that DHS did not regularly track whether the ventilators had been maintained by the firm with which it contracted or develop a plan for the future use of the ventilators.”
“An audit is a valuable tool for oversight when questions and concerns are brought to our attention,” Wittke said. “We have a responsibility to question and review programs, processes, staffing, efficiencies and more.”
