The Indiana State House in Indianapolis, Indiana
The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration lost nearly three-dozen laptops, worth an estimated $21,800, in the chaos of setting up and winding down a statewide vaccination hotline during the height of the pandemic.
The state office charged with investigating waste, fraud and abuse — the Office of the Inspector General — called the loss “not acceptable,” in a report released last week. The mayhem was such that prosecutors declined to prosecute, citing poor business practices.
The administration runs Indiana’s 211 hotline, which connects Hoosiers to a wide range of services. As vaccines became available in Indiana, that included a call center to help residents schedule appointments.
FSSA asked the Indiana Office of Technology to buy it about 500 laptops for the call center, and it contracted with a company called Knowledge Services to bring large numbers of short-term remote workers on quickly.
But as those employees were laid off in bulk, left voluntarily or were fired, not all returned their laptops. The administration initially reported that 53 laptops were lost or stolen to the Indiana State Police.
Lack of documentation
The inspector general’s office found that in the rush to get the call center operational, the agency documented very little. It didn’t track which contract employee got which laptop, for example, because it placed the bulk order before Knowledge Services had even completed hiring.
When administration employees realized laptops were going missing — weeks or months after the fact — at least one told the inspector general’s office that he started writing down names. But he said it wasn’t standard practice “because of the number of people involved.”
And FSSA assumed, he said, that Knowledge Services was responsible for returning the laptops and that the technology office could track missing ones. Neither was fully true.
The administration itself was responsible for the laptops. And for the technology office to remotely lock out a laptop and ping its location, it had to be both on and connected to the internet, the report said.
FSSA and Knowledge Services collaborated on a computer tracking list, updated whenever an employee came on or left, to more quickly identify missing laptops.
Otherwise, the administration found itself with few options.
“One employee … asked if Knowledge Services could withhold the last paycheck for employees who failed to return laptops and was told no,” the inspector general’s office wrote. “Another FSSA employee stated that he asked if the State could bill Knowledge Services for the missing laptops and was told it could not.”
But add more chaos: the administration didn’t immediately report the losses. Knowledge Services didn’t document its attempts to contact former employees. The administration gave former contractors a range of ways to return the laptops — which, by involving multiple state agencies, meant other agencies or even different divisions of the same agencies didn’t know of the returns.
The investigation
Indiana State Police submitted the investigation to the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, but it declined to prosecute the case, citing “poor business practices” — laptops issued without documentation, laptops returned haphazardly and so on.
“In this case, the lack of clear policies and procedures, as well as the assumptions that another agency or the contractor would be responsible for missing assets, contributed to the loss of over $20,000 of state equipment,” the inspector general’s office concluded. “Such loss is not acceptable.”
The inspector general’s office acknowledged the uniqueness of the pandemic, but told state agencies to “prepare now” for future scenarios involving hiring a large number of contract employees on short notice.
Agencies, the office said, “must find ways to better manage and protect these resources so that taxpayer funds are not wasted on state equipment that is never returned to the State.”
The office recommended that the administration and any other agency report suspected theft immediately, that the technology office tell agencies that they’re responsible for the equipment when they receive it and that agencies have clear policies for tracking laptop assignments and other state assets.
It also said the technology office and agencies should develop a consistent way to return equipment — the havoc in returns was a “major reason” prosecutors didn’t go ahead with a case — and require employees to sign statements that failure to return the equipment could be theft.
The office added that the state should work stronger protections into its contracts with vendors, declaring that the state “failed to hold Knowledge Services fully accountable for their employees’ failure to return state equipment” even as it acknowledged the collaborative tracking efforts.
This story by Leslie Bonilla Muñiz is republished from indianacapitalchronicle.com, an independent, not-for-profit news organization that covers state government, policy and elections.
