The Comptroller of Puerto Rico issued a qualified opinion on the fiscal operations of the Alianza Municipal para el Desarrollo Económico (AMDE). A qualified opinion is issued when the noncompliance, individually or in the aggregate, is significant but not pervasive.
The report reveals that none of the training service providers submitted to the AMDE the evaluation report with the names of the participants retained as permanent employees no later than 30 days after the training was completed. Nor did the officials request this report, which is mandatory.
This situation makes it difficult to verify compliance with the terms of the contract and the placement of participants in jobs. In addition, without the evaluation report the AMDE did not have the information to recover 30% of the cost of the participants who completed the training but were not retained in the job. The eight-finding audit points out that the disbursing officer made 918 payments for $457,273 through electronic transfers with duplicate numbers. The Alianza Municipal lacked a regulation for processing payments through electronic transfers and the digitization of payments.
The AMDE did not provide for examination by the Comptroller's auditors the file of proposals for contracting legal, accounting and fiscal advisory services. In addition, contrary to the Regulation for Municipal Administration of 2016, the administration made disbursements without the certification of absence of interest, payments without the providers' signature, and purchase orders lacking basic information such as the physical address, email address and the bidders' signature.
The Report discloses that the AMDE registered and submitted 50% of its contracts to the Comptroller up to eight months later than required by the regulations in force. This situation prevents the contracts from being accessible to citizens within 15 days of being granted, as public documents.
Likewise, the AMDE submitted the Management Letters of the external audits to the Office of the Comptroller after almost three years; the monthly Position Registry reports up to 21 months late; and the Negative Certification on the Status of Privatizations up to 15 months late. These situations are attributed to the lack of supervision to comply with the related laws by the then executive director.
The Office of the Comptroller's auditors identified the lack of internal and administrative controls required for the protection of the AMDE's documents, as they did not have written procedures. In addition, an interagency agreement required in the designation of officials of the Municipality of Coamo was not formalized to carry out management tasks in Finance and Human Resources at the AMDE.
The AMDE, formerly Área Local de Desarrollo Laboral Surcentral, is an alliance of the municipalities of Salinas, Coamo, Juana Díaz, Barranquitas, Santa Isabel and Naranjito, which administers the funds of the WIOA—Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014. These funds are used for workforce development in those municipalities.
The report covers the period from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2017.
See Audit Report M-20-09.
To see other published reports, visit our Audit Reports section.
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