By Delayna Earley
The Island News
Beaufort County Council released report of the audit conducted to investigate purchasing and procurement issues following a Special-Called Council Meeting on Tuesday, July 23.
County Council hired an outside law firm to conduct the audit into the P-Card purchases and procurement code following their decision to terminate with cause former County Administrator Eric Greenway in July 2023.
In the report, it shows that the investigation done by law firm Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd found that 312 of 392 contracts that were signed in 2023 were not put through the competitive bid process.
The contracts that were not competitively bid totaled almost $13 million, while the 80 contracts that did go through the bidding process totaled over $85 million.
County employees with P-Cards spent just over $6 million from 2019 to 2023 according to the report.
Beyond that, no information was given about specific contracts, employees responsible for p-card purchases nor any of the employees involved in producing the competitively bid and non-competitively bid contracts.
The report also states that “more likely than not” the Beaufort County staff’s failure to adhere to the County’s procurement and P-Card guidelines was the result of “misfeasance rather than malfeasance, and no evidence of criminal activity has been discovered.”
In addition to the summary of the investigation, the report outlines “action items” that they intend for the new county administrator Michael Moore to ensure that county employees follow going forward.
For procurements, employees are to take steps to provide for a more robust documentation of the procurements, they are to take steps to ensure that all procurements fall within the County’s budget authority, and they are to ensure proper determination of fair and reasonable pricing.
Additionally, they are to require documented “determinations of a bidder’s responsiveness and a bidder’s responsibility,” and do a better job with checks and balances to protect against erroneous justifications for non-competitive procedures.
They are to encourage more competition and robust negotiations with bidders and encourage participation from smaller, disadvantaged businesses.
Finally, county staff will undergo more extensive training regarding the county’s procurement system.
As for the P-Card purchases, the county plans to create a policy for the number and assignment of P-Cards to reduce the number of users and enforce the requirement that purchases receive authorization and proper documentation is submitted with the payment request.
The county also plans to change the approval process so that subordinates can no longer authorize expenses for their managers and an individual cannot authorize their own expenses.
A new travel policy will also be put into place to ensure that hotel stays and meal reimbursements have to be a minimum distance limit from the county, to restrict how many employees can attend meetings, conferences or events, to prevent individuals from accruing loyalty points.
They plan to create a centralized purchasing policy to ensure oversight of purchases such as IT equipment, business cards, office supplies, work gear, tools, appliances and marketing materials.
While the action plan outlined in the report was put together by County Council behind closed doors, there were a few council members who argued before council entered executive session that it should be discussed openly in public.
Council members Tom Reitz and Paula Brown made a motion to hold the discussion in public and David Bartholomew voted along with them to hold it in public, but the rest of the present council voted against having a public discussion.
“In executive session, what we did was to take the report that you see here that we just approved,” Council Chairman Joe Passiment said after the executive session. We went through the report just to correct some grammar, punctuation and a sentence or two that didn’t make sense. Once those have been done, and those will be done as quickly as we can, it will be posted in the appropriate places.”
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
