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Audit of the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

An overview of the purpose and process of auditing of the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office

Table of Contents

Overview

In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor (OSA) has conducted a performance audit of certain activities of the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office (BCDA) for the period January 1, 2017 through December 31, 2017.

We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards, except Objective 3 below, which the audit constraints affected our ability to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to meet. The standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. If sufficient, appropriate evidence had been provided, we might have been able to conclude that Objective 3 was met, or we might have identified other issues with the performance of the program. For the other objectives, we believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Below is a list of our audit objectives, indicating each question we intended our audit to answer; the conclusion we reached regarding each objective; and, if applicable, where each objective is discussed in the audit findings.

Objective

Conclusion

  1. Does BCDA ensure that all program requirements are fulfilled and documented for participants who have successfully completed its Juvenile Diversion Program?

Yes

  1. Does BCDA measure the performance of its Juvenile Diversion Program?

No; see Finding 1

  1. Does BCDA’s Victim Witness Assistance Program provide assistance throughout the court process to victims and witnesses of crimes as required by Section 5 of Chapter 258B of the General Laws?

Inconclusive; see Audit Constraints

 

To achieve our objectives, we gained an understanding of BCDA’s internal control environment related to our audit objectives by reviewing applicable laws, regulations, and agency policies and procedures, as well as conducting inquiries with BCDA’s staff and management.

Audit Constraints

Section 7.11 of Chapter 7 of the US Government Accountability Office’s Government Auditing Standards states,

Auditors should . . . report any significant constraints imposed on the audit approach by information limitations or scope impairments, including denials or excessive delays of access to certain records or individuals.

During our audit, BCDA imposed significant constraints on the audit process because the office was concerned about the confidentiality of information related to participants in its Juvenile Diversion and Victim Witness Assistance Programs. Specifically, BCDA did not give OSA access to specific information regarding program participants that OSA needed in order to conduct the audit testing in a timely manner. In some cases, BCDA took more than a month to provide requested information. Although OSA was eventually able to complete the audit work that was necessary to meet some of the audit objectives, these constraints significantly delayed the completion of the audit.

The constraints were as follows:

  • BCDA officials initially refused to give us access to the Juvenile Diversion Program and Victim Witness Assistance Program case files because of confidentiality concerns. In September 2017, the OSA Legal Department drafted a confidentiality agreement to resolve BCDA’s concerns. However, BCDA never signed this agreement and did not provide the requested documents until May 2018.
  • BCDA did not give us access to source documents to conduct our audit testing. We received redacted Juvenile Diversion Program case files and were not allowed to review or handle Victim Witness Assistance Program case files containing advocate notes and dates when contact was made with victims or witnesses. Rather, the contents of the selected files were read to us by an Assistant District Attorney.
  • BCDA did not allow us to review and assess the adequacy of key information technology controls, such as system access, security, and monitoring controls that it had established over its District Attorney Management Information Office Network (DAMION)2 system, to conduct testing and determine the reliability of the information that BCDA provided from this system.

Methodology

We performed the following procedures to address our audit objectives:

  • We reviewed a nonstatistical random sample of 15 out of 97 Juvenile Diversion Program case files disposed of during the audit period to determine whether contracts were signed by the juvenile, parent/guardian, and Assistant District Attorney and whether there was evidence that the specific conditions required by the signed contracts had been met by participants who successfully completed all program requirements (e.g., performing community service, writing an essay, or completing an online education program). However, the information in the case files we reviewed was redacted.
  • We asked BCDA officials about the process of tracking or measuring the performance of the Juvenile Diversion Program. BCDA officials told us that the office does not track participants after they complete the program to measure the program’s performance.
  • For the Victim Witness Assistance Program, we selected a statistical, random sample using a 95% confidence level and a tolerable error rate of 5%. We sampled 60 out of 14,053 cases that were active during the audit period involving charges for crimes related to Chapters 265 and 266 of the General Laws to obtain cases that involved a victim and/or witness. However, because of the audit constraints mentioned above, we could not review the source documents in the files for these cases; instead, an Assistant District Attorney reviewed each file in our presence and explained how BCDA offered victims and witnesses of crimes the rights and services governed by Section 5 of Chapter 258B of the General Laws (see Appendix).

In the cases in which we applied a nonstatistical approach, we were not able to, and therefore did not, project our results to the entire population.

We obtained lists of criminal cases for the Juvenile Diversion and Victim Witness Assistance Programs from DAMION. We were not allowed to see the names of the Juvenile Diversion and Victim Witness Assistance Program participants to select a sample of case files from the file cabinet and trace the files back to the lists. Additionally, we were only allowed to see redacted Juvenile Diversion Program case files rather than original source documents. An Assistant District Attorney reviewed and read us excerpts from the victim witness advocates’ notes in the case files that pertained to our audit objective. We could not determine the reliability of the data obtained because of the audit constraints noted above. Although the lists were of undetermined reliability, they comprised all the information we could obtain to perform our audit testing and on which we could base our conclusions.

2.   DAMION is BCDA’s case-management system. BCDA uses it to track court dates for each case.

Date published: October 1, 2018

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