Procurement: Expired Contracts and Cooperative Agreements—April 2019
Procurement: Expired Contracts and Cooperative Agreements
Released April 2019
Download the Full Report here
Download the Report Highlights here
We undertook this audit because city councilmembers expressed concern about the city paying on expired contracts. Our audit reviews the city's administration of contracts, including amendments, renewals, extensions, and expiration. It also examines roles and responsibilities of the Department of Procurement and user agencies and evaluates the completeness of data sources used by contract administrators to monitor the status of existing agreements. Our recommendations focus on reducing the risk of operating with and making payments on expired contracts and ensuring that the city is obtaining competitive pricing when using cooperative agreements.
Released April 2019
Download the Full Report here
Download the Report Highlights here
We undertook this audit because city councilmembers expressed concern about the city paying on expired contracts. Our audit reviews the city's administration of contracts, including amendments, renewals, extensions, and expiration. It also examines roles and responsibilities of the Department of Procurement and user agencies and evaluates the completeness of data sources used by contract administrators to monitor the status of existing agreements. Our recommendations focus on reducing the risk of operating with and making payments on expired contracts and ensuring that the city is obtaining competitive pricing when using cooperative agreements.
We found:
- The Department of Procurement began notifying users of contract expiration in 2018, primarily via email.
- The spreadsheet used by the department to track citywide contracts, and which is loaded into Oracle to generate automated notifications to user departments, is incomplete, which results in some notifications falling through the cracks.
- This incomplete data has contributed to the city retroactively approving contracts to make payments on expired contracts.
- The city cannot be fully assured that cooperative agreements provide the best value—18 of 20 cooperative agreements we reviewed did not contain all documents to show competitive pricing, such as price comparisons or market data.