Dave Druker remembers this one: The car was
taken away, says the spokesman for Secretary of State Jesse White. The car in question was a state-owned vehicle
used by a secretary to commute to work in Springfield back in 2003.
She lived in Centralia, making her daily round trip a 200-mile
journey. There was nothing nefarious going on, White’s office
insisted then, as it does now: She stopped to do business at agency
facilities on her way to and from work, so her use of a
taxpayer-owned car was a legitimate public expense. Maybe, maybe not. Trouble was, there was no
way to verify any official-business stops, nor did White’s
office have any documentation certifying that the car was being
used for public purposes. The case wasn’t unique. The Office
of the Auditor General three years ago noted that no documentation
existed for any of the 82 state cars (not including police
vehicles) assigned to employees of the secretary of state.
“We were unable to determine exactly how the employee used
the vehicle as no log or purpose of travel is required from
employees driving personally assigned State vehicles,”
auditors wrote in 2003. “That was a number of years ago,”
Druker says. “We did have the car taken away.” Why? “I think they felt they didn’t
want another audit report,” Druker says. Well, they didn’t succeed. In a report issued March 30, the state auditor
general says that no documentation was on file at the secretary of
state’s office for 59 of the 62 state-owned cars assigned to
White’s nonpolice employees as of June 2005. The
documentation forms, which must be signed by the employee, a
supervisor, and a department director, don’t sound
particularly onerous. Developed after the 2003 audit, the forms are supposed to be
reviewed annually to ensure that the official-business reason for
letting an employee use a taxpayer-owned car still exists. The criteria
that allow a nonpolice employee to be assigned a car include when an
employee must drive considerable distances to many locations without
stopping at headquarters; when an employee is regularly called to
business from home outside normal hours; and a catch-all: When it is in
the best interest of the secretary of state. In its response to the 2003 audit, the
secretary of state’s office said that documentation forms had
been created and would be kept on file. This time, officials in the
office told auditors that they didn’t have documentation
because they were in the midst of reassigning state vehicles and
cutting down on the number of cars assigned to employees and
hadn’t completed the required paperwork. The
secretary’s staff told auditors that documentation has now
been completed. State auditors don’t consider the matter
merely a paperwork oversight. “If it’s in that report, we
consider that to be important,” says Jim Dahlquist, spokesman
for the state auditor general’s office. State Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Pontiac, who is
running for White’s office, says that the problems
aren’t egregious, especially compared with problems uncovered
at other agencies such as the Department of Transportation, where
state auditors have found nearly $700,000 in
questionable spending, including money that went for tattoos instead of
roadwork. “From what I can see, at least the secretary of
state’s office is saying they’re looking to meet compliance
standards,” Rutherford says. Auditors have previously criticized
White’s office for failing to keep tabs on publicly owned
property. An estimated $1.4 million worth of computers, cameras,
fax machines, furniture, and other office equipment has disappeared
since White was elected in 1999. In a 2001 report, state auditors
said that 22 percent of the equipment they had tried to find could
not be located. In the most recent report, auditors said that
they found other problems with vehicles assigned to the secretary
of state’s office. Auditors reviewed 10 accidents and found
five cases in which the office was between five and 532 days late
in reporting accidents to the Department of Central Management
Services. White’s office told auditors that four of the five
involved hit-and-runs of unattended state vehicles, and the
employee in charge didn’t know those incidents had to be
reported. In the fifth case, in which a report was made five days
late, White’s staff blamed a misunderstanding of the rules.
Failure to promptly report accidents was also an issue in 2003,
when six of 10 accidents auditors looked at were reported between
five and 124 days late. Auditors also found personal use of state
vehicles wasn’t being properly recorded so that it could be
taxed. Auditors found the same problems in 2003 — in the
commuting secretary’s case, just $3 a day was being added to
her taxable wages, even though her use of the car was costing the
state $72 a day. Auditors in their most recent report did not say
how much had gone unreported.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2006.
