The Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico issued a qualified opinion on the operations of the computerized information systems of the Auxiliary Secretariat for Environmental Health and Public Health Laboratory of the Department of Health. A qualified opinion is issued when the instances of noncompliance, individually or in the aggregate, are significant but not pervasive.
The one-finding Report reveals that the contracts formalized to provide access to services for citizens from a digital platform lacked the necessary clauses to guarantee, during an emergency, the continuity of these services. Some of these services available 24 hours a day, seven days a week are: the request for inspection, the renewals of licenses and permits, the processing of payments, and the assignment of inspectors.
This situation would cause that, upon termination of the contract, the Department would be left without access to its data. In fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the contract expired and the company disconnected from the platform the services related to the Auxiliary Secretariat for Environmental Health.
The audit notes that the company did not deliver the backups of the processed transactions, as stipulated in the first contract, and the Department did not request them either. As of July 16, 2020, the Auxiliary Secretariat did not have the backups of the information processed on the digital platform. This situation does not allow having available, in case of emergency, the information backups necessary for the continuity of operations.
This third and final report covers the period from May 5, 2014 to November 30, 2020.
See Audit Report TI-22-11.
To see other published reports, visit our Audit Reports section.
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