The Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico issues a favorable opinion with exceptions on the fiscal operations related to the payments of unemployment insurance benefits of the Employment Security Bureau of the Department of Labor and Human Resources.
The Report reveals that the Technical Services Unit attached to the Unemployment Insurance Program did not have regulations or approved procedures to govern its operations. This Unit is in charge of, among others, the control measures over the assignment and inactivation of the codes assigned to the interviewers of unemployment insurance claimants, the accesses to the automated Benefits system (SABEN), and the application for the payment of benefits by direct deposit. The lack of regulations fosters the environment for committing errors and affects the reliability of the transactions.
The three-finding audit indicates that the lack of regulations and the fact that the director of the Bureau did not exercise effective supervision is the cause for the specialist of the Technical Services Unit to perform conflicting functions. Some of these functions, contrary to Act 230 of 1974, the Government Accounting Act of Puerto Rico, included activating and deactivating the codes and accesses, while also being able to edit, add, or delete information in the direct deposit application.
Our auditors identified multiple internal control failures over the codes assigned to the interviewers. For example, the specialist did not maintain a registry of assigned and inactivated codes and did not ensure, before activating the codes for the interviewers, that these had not been used previously. The specialist also did not ensure that the managers of the 13 local offices, in Arecibo, Aguadilla, Bayamón, Carolina, Caguas, Coamo, Fajardo, Guayama, Humacao, Mayagüez, Ponce, San Germán, and San Juan, assigned the codes in consecutive order.
The Report covers the period from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2017.
See Audit Report DA-18-10.
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