Northern Va. Community College Spent $1.3 Million on Sketchy Contracts

At least one of Virginia’s 23 community colleges has some serious shaping up to do, a recent state audit revealed.

Northern Virginia Community College paid $1.3 million in hourly rates of up to $290 to a firm it didn’t even hold accountable to make good on its contracts, an audit from the state’s Auditor of Public Accounts on the community college system reveals.

“We did have a couple of findings this year that actually led us to potential waste where funds maybe could have been spent in a better manner,” said Zachary Borgerding, audit director over reporting and standards.

Northern Virginia Community College, which has multiple campuses throughout the suburbs of Washington, D.C., entered into seven contracts totaling $1.3 million to the major consulting firm ARCADIS for architectural and engineering consulting.

But it used the firm to manage non-capital projects in a way the audit said went beyond the parameters of community college policy. Specifically, the college paid ARCADIS’ water division, Malcolm Pirnie, which was a separate company until ARCADIS acquired it in 2009, according to Borgerding.

The school paid ARCADIS hourly rates ranging from $133 to $290 an hour at one point, “significantly higher than benchmark firms performing similar work at NVCC,” the audit said.

NVCC didn’t assign an administrator to review contracts, and invoices were approved for payment without any review as to whether the firm had performed the work.

On top of that, Arcadis was supposed to submit weekly reports summarizing activity for the week, but didn’t — for at least two years.

The full report is online here.

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