(The Center Square) — According to a recent audit by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office, the Louisiana Public Assistance Program had discrepancies of over $256 million in reimbursement requests.
The program, which is administered through the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, was audited for the period of Jan. 1, through June 30.
Auditors looked through over 2,800 requests totaling around $930 million and found exceptions of more than $500 per reimbursement request equaling about $256 million in 511 reimbursement requests.
An audit exception is any finding that falls outside of the expected results of an audit after going through the necessary steps. The problems cited fell into five categories: Lack of supporting documentation, missing procurement documentation, out-of-scope expenses, errors and ineligible expenses.
The first and most expensive category was a lack of supporting documentation, which occurred in 358 requests. The expenses not supported by invoices, receipts, contracts, etc. totaled over $177 million and almost 19% of the total requests analyzed.
Similarly, procurement of reimbursements over $30,000 were not documented correctly on 56 occasions. This equaled $52.6 million in exception amount.
Fifty two reimbursement requests to the tune of $19.6 million were given despite the work being outside the approved scope of the project. that means 2.1% of the requests studied had exceptions as a result of out-of-scope expenses.
Like in the case of out-of-scope expenses, some exceptions were ineligible costs because the work didn’t comply with FEMA regulations. This happened 72 times and amounted over $4.8 million in exceptions.
The final type of exception noted were errors, which could be a result of expenses duplicated, incorrect vendor information, and or incorrect invoice amounts. This happened 27 times and added to $1.7 million in unaccounted reimbursement money.
Program officials responded to the audit saying they concur with the audit’s findings and are continuing to improve on program management, diligence and accountability.
