Improvements Made but Capital Project Data Issues Persist

The executive branch has a plan to address shortcomings in capital project budget information by modifying the Capital Project Information Center using funding approved in 2014. This report highlights progress on policies, systems, and reporting tools intended to improve capital project data. The issues below continue to need addressing:

• Agencies are using different approaches to record budgets of related projects, reducing transparency and accountability.
• Project teams are not consistently recording project budgets and expenditures by capital phase in the Oracle finance system (EBS), reducing the usefulness of the data for evaluating performance and preparing future project cost estimates.
• The finance and payroll systems allow users to charge expenditures to any project, increasing the risk of errors. The Finance and Business Operation Division has not provided guidelines and tools to help agencies identify project mischarges.
• Discrepancies remain in historical project cost and budget data transferred to EBS from legacy finance systems.

We make recommendations focused on resolving the weaknesses noted above and moving the County toward a reliable system for managing capital budget data.

The Auditor’s Office has been conducting oversight on executive branch efforts to improve the reliability, usefulness, and accessibility of capital project data in countywide systems. This is a significant issue for the County since having access to reliable information is necessary for conducting legislative oversight and making informed decisions on capital spending. This is our third report on this topic.