PITTSBURGH — A job training agency in northwest Pennsylvania is asking the state for a repayment plan after a finding that nearly $250,000 was misspent. A 51-page audit questioned everything from lunch meetings to goldfish.
The state’s Office of the Budget did a performance audit of the Regional Center for Workforce Excellence, covering July 1, 2009, to July 30, 2013. The center was the fiscal agent for the Northwest Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Board, an agency that covers six counties in the northwest corner of the state, including Erie County.
The auditor raised multiple concerns.
One of the issues was that board members participated in what looked like insider contracts.
“While purchasing from board members may not be a direct violation of the conflict-of-interest policy, the procurement activities exhibited by the WIB and Fiscal Agent give the public the perception taxpayer dollars may have been spent for personal gain or squandered,” noted the report.
The auditor was also concerned with a seeming lack of transparency.
The report also found that “meeting minutes were edited by personnel to omit specific information and financial statement disclosures lacked clarity, which caused information shared with the public to also lack transparency.”
Additionally, “Specific topics discussed were often omitted from meeting minutes, which routinely used phrases like ‘discussion ensued’ rather than documenting the actual dialogue.”
The auditor also raised an eyebrow at the $113,000 “expensed to the ‘Food Meetings’ category in the Fiscal Agent’s accounting system” between 2010 and 2012, as well as $5,000 worth of “glossy report handouts” for an annual dinner meeting.
Additionally, “Workforce investment funding was spent on helium and balloons, goldfish, tulle, goblets, flowers, monthly coffee service, building photos and pictures,” the audit found.
The Regional Center for Workforce Excellence bluntly contested a variety of the auditor’s findings and characterizations. Under a single finding, it used the sentence “The auditor is incorrect” four times.
In one particularly snippy response, it stated, “The auditor provides various examples of what it considers to be waste or abuse of funds by RCWE. That is the perspective of the auditor. The other perspective, and the one that is correct, is that these expenditures of funds were to enhance the mission … as well as to promote the services.”
