American Idol 2012 finale
Rollover crash injures 2
News hounds (5/24/12)
Home > Blogs > Butler County News and Issues > Archives > 2009 > August > 13 > Entry
Auditor asks for some of county’s money back for jail renovation - The bill
As a follow-up to the investigation I did of renovation of Butler County’s Court Street jail - which was overseen by Resolutions, Community Solutions with no bid or contract and architectural work appears to have been done before it was bid out - I have this story.
An excerpt (Go here for the full story):
The nonprofit Resolutions Community Solutions Inc. overbilled Butler County $24,266 for overseeing renovations of the county’s Court Street jail, according to an analysis by Auditor Roger Reynolds.
After a Cox Publishing investigation of the project — in which Resolutions oversaw jail renovation in 2006 and 2007 with no bidding and little county oversight — Reynolds reviewed the invoices.
He found bad math and duplicate invoices cost the county $24,266. Reynolds sent Resolutions a bill that was paid in little more than a week, he said.
“Once we became aware of it and he sent us the documents, we corrected it,” said Resolutions Vice President Steve Best.
On one invoice, the agency billed the county $111,925 with backup documentation attached that added up to $105,299. The invoice also included subcontractor invoices billed twice, including a $9,700 payment to Johnstone Supply.
Another invoice had the same problems. The county paid $267,195 while backup documents added up to $264,551. Duplicate payments to three companies added up to $7,924.
“They look like common errors from what I saw,” Reynolds said. “But more importantly, what I saw was a lack of internal controls on the part of the previous auditor and the administration.”
Here is the letter from Reynolds to Resolutions describing the billing errors (Ignore the fax cover page, that’s from when I requested the letter):
(Click on the top right corner to enlarge)
What do you think?
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Resolutions
Comments
By M
August 13, 2009 9:46 AM | Link to this
Didn’t they have an initial bid of $800K to renovate the facility until Mr. Jones said he could use convict labor and do the job cheaper. Now it has cost 1.2 million and we still supposedly owe $180K ? So, $1.38 million to do an $800K job and all he can find is $24K ? I guess that’s lookimg out for your friends. An auditor should read the bill of materials too, not just add up the numbers.
By Carl
August 13, 2009 11:38 AM | Link to this
My question is where did all the tools they purchased go. Doesn’t the county have an inventory system to account for what they purchase? I understand that much of this money was spent to purchase equipment and tools to do the work with and now one can account for these county owned tools and equipment. The sheriff needs to account for these tools; otherwise someone needs to be charged with theft.