Baltimore, MD - The Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE)’s Safe Streets program must strengthen its monitoring controls for reimbursement requests to avoid duplicate and overpayments to its partners, according to a performance audit conducted by the Department of Audits (DOA).  

DOA assessed MONSE’s internal controls concerning Safe Streets program expenditures, focusing on fiscal years 2022 and 2023. The audit was presented to the Board of Estimates at its November 20^th meeting.

Findings

DOA found that MONSE’s monitoring controls for validating reimbursement requests for Safe Streets subrecipients are not functioning effectively. Of note:

1. Duplicate payments were made. Specifically, DOA identified three duplicate payments totaling $290,357 for three invoices in FY 2023 and FY 2024. Invoices of $79,098 in July 2022, $149,528 in May 2023 and $61,731 in January 2024 were paid twice to a subrecipient. MONSE did not have a process to track all payments made. All duplicate payments were recovered by the City.
2. MONSE does not consistently verify the daily activities of the subrecipients’ employees. Based on auditor’s calculations, from July 1, 2021, to January 31, 2024, MONSE made estimated reimbursement of $257,322 to subrecipients without validating the daily activities of the subrecipients’ employees for 180 of 271 sample (66 percent).
3. MONSE regularly processed reimbursements without checking payroll records. DOA found six names included in the approved budgets of some subrecipient contracts; however, these individuals were never actually employed by the subrecipients. Although the DOA did not find any cases where the city was billed for these individuals, their names were forwarded to the Baltimore City Inspector General for further review.

Recommendations

DOA recommends that the Director of MONSE: 

• Maintain a schedule of approved reimbursement requests and verify if payments have already been made when new requests come in. 
• Ensure receipts are matched to invoices in Workday. 
• Validate subrecipients’ employee activity logs. 
• Confirm that salaries billed match payroll registers. 
• Recalculate invoice totals to verify the accuracy of billed amounts. 
• Implement a secondary review process for invoices prior to payment approval. 

MONSE agreed with the audit findings and have either already implemented or are preparing to implement new controls and processes. A full response from MONSE is available in the audit report.

“This inaugural performance audit shows that while MONSE does have many baseline controls in place, there is still room for improvement,” Comptroller Bill Henry said. “The improved results on our increasingly safer streets need to be matched with improved results from our back-of-house operations. I’m glad to see MONSE is open to the Department of Audits’ recommendations and is already at work addressing these issues.”

Resources:

Audit Explainer

Audit Report