The State Auditor is looking into how and when state agencies are spending their allocated budget dollars to make sure they aren’t giving a false impression of how much money they need.
Schweich says there’s a widely held notion that state agencies wait until the last month of the fiscal year to spend all their money, which could be wasteful. He says he’s doing an audit because no one has ever tested it.
He says there’s several ways to waste money: to buy too much or to buy something without a bidding, or procurement process to make sure its the best deal. He says his office is formulated a protocol for finding waste. He gave the example of if a department has 20 people, but bought 50 computers in the last year for no good reason, that is considered wasteful.
The audit will be done in 6-8 months, and will cover the agencies that spend the most money.