Patrol property missing

LINCOLN — The Nebraska State Patrol has joined the list of state agencies drawing the ire of State Auditor Mike Foley for lax inventory of state property.

Foley’s office, in an audit released Thursday, identified nearly $700,000 worth of patrol inventory, amassed between 1969 and 2007, that could not be found.

The lost items included a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer — worth $129,000 when it was purchased in 1988 — that was eventually found to have been declared “surplus property” last year.

Recent state audits have criticized the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications Commission and the University of Nebraska for failing to properly account for state assets.

State statutes require an annual inventory of property held by state agencies, Foley said, and until agencies comply with that, he’ll continue to criticize them.

“You should have good processes in place to track public property. Who is that rifle assigned to? Where is it today?” he said. “Someone has to be responsible for that equipment.”

A State Patrol spokeswoman said Thursday that the inventory problems did not appear to be linked to any fraud or mismanagement.

Spokeswoman Deb Collins said the patrol is working with the Department of Administrative Services to adopt a new, computerized inventory tracking system.

“We believe (the problem) is the difference between an old paper inventory system that needs to be moved into a new electronic system,” Collins said.

Overall, Foley said, the State Patrol was responsive to his concerns and is a well-run agency interested in “doing things right.”

He said he remains concerned, however, about state agencies’ lax compliance with the annual inventory requirement.

Questions about the location and status of state-owned property are of particular importance when state legislators allocate tax funds to purchase property, said Foley, a former state senator. Taxpayers deserve to know whether state property is being used or has been declared surplus and sold off.

One missing item at the patrol was a Remington shotgun worth $365. Foley said digging by auditors found that it had been sold as surplus in 2004, but that, like the surplus gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, hadn’t been noted in the state information database.

When the missing item is a gun, “it seems you should go that extra step: Where is that gun?” Foley said.

A gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer can be used to detect drugs or poisons in human tissue associated with criminal cases.

A state audit earlier this year found that NET could not account for nearly $600,000 worth of property, including a $29,000 video camera and two $23,000 Betamax tape players.

A 2008 audit of NU found that there was no universitywide policy to account for missing property. The audit noted that the University of Nebraska at Omaha had simply removed from its inventory nearly $500,000 worth of property it could not find.

NU, in its response in the audit, said it was taking inventories every two years, per federal guidelines, because it was “more cost-effective” than the state-required annual inventories.

Other problems raised in the State Patrol audit included lax accounting of a $30-a-month clothing allowance given to undercover officers, the lack of an inventory for five years of items held in an evidence room at the North Platte troop headquarters and whether $1.8 million in overtime and compensatory time expenses were warranted in a 12-month span beginning April 1, 2008.

Collins, the patrol spokeswoman, said she had not had time to review the entire audit.

Foley said he was told that some of the overtime hours were paid through federal grants for things such as special traffic enforcement efforts.

He said the Legislature’s performance audit committee might want to dig deeper into the overtime question.

Contact the writer:

402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com