Audit flags payroll, asset-recording and vehicle-log problems in Shared Administrative Services report

Tom Bullington summarized five findings from the Department of Transformation/Shared Administrative Services FY2024 audit, and agency officials answered committee questions about corrective steps and planned technology rollouts.

The audit identified: (1) an $800 career-service payment issued in error because rehire data were entered incorrectly; (2) an asset (about $30,000) sent for repair on 05/24/2021 that was not deactivated in ACES until 12/19/2023; (3) two cameras valued at about $8,500 that remained on the fixed-asset listing despite a 07/10/2023 internal finding that they had been stolen; (4) an overstatement of more than $940,000 in year-end cash records from double counting; and (5) repeated vehicle-log deficiencies, including missing fields for date/time, mileage and fuel purchases.

James Caldwell, Chief Fiscal Officer for Shared Administrative Services, told the committee the person who stole the cameras was a former employee who pled guilty and paid restitution, and the agency recovered the value of those items. Courtney Traylor, chief of staff at Shared Administrative Services, described short-term fixes and a planned statewide rollout of telematics: "The GPS will provide all of that information directly from the vehicle back to us so they don't have to actually fill out the log," Traylor said, adding that SAS is negotiating a vendor and expects the department to go first in deployment and "hopefully no later than July."

Committee members pressed on monitoring and operations: staff said the program would recommend a single vendor rolled out statewide, that Shared Administrative Services would provide administrative oversight while departments retain access, and that fuel purchases are tracked with assigned WEX cards tied to employee IDs with alerts for location mismatches and abnormal purchases.

Outcome: the committee filed the Shared Administrative Services audit report without objection. The presentation did not include formal corrective orders during the session; any follow-up would proceed through the audit office and agency implementation plans.