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 Department of Fish and Game (DFG) for the period July 1, 2016 through December 31, 2018.
We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those 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. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.
Below is our audit objective, indicating the question we intended our audit to answer, the conclusion we reached regarding the objective, and where the objective is discussed in this report.
To achieve our objective, we gained an understanding of the internal controls we deemed significant to the objective through interviews and observations. We evaluated the design and effectiveness of those controls and assessed whether they operated as intended during the audit period as they related to the charging and reporting of revenue from fees, licenses, and permits. In addition, we performed the following procedures to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to address our audit objective.
- We compared the MassFishHunt (MFH) and Fish fee schedules to the fee schedule in 801 CMR 4.02 to determine whether they agreed, and we investigated any discrepancies we found.
- We selected a nonstatistical, judgmental sample of 21 different charges from a population of 82 charges in MFH to ensure that the proper amount was generated in MFH; we did this by simulating actual transactions.
- We performed a statistical test of 24 daily revenue totals (representing $1,312,405) out of 8,735 (representing $26,743,973) for the audit period from the Massachusetts Management Accounting and Reporting System (MMARS), the official financial record of the Commonwealth. We did this using a 90% confidence level, a 10% tolerable error rate, and a 0% expected error rate. We verified that the revenue agreed to DFG’s cash-out reports, daily agency cash reports, reconciliations, and deposits. We traced lump sum deposits to bank statements and reviewed cash receipt (CR) entries in MMARS. From the same population, we selected five additional transactions described as miscellaneous income, totaling $967,505, and verified that the revenue agreed to DFG’s reconciliations. We also traced lump sums to bank statements, and we reviewed CR entries in MMARS.
Data Reliability
In 2018, OSA performed a data reliability assessment of MMARS that focused on testing selected system controls (access controls, application controls, configuration management, contingency planning, and segregation of duties) for the period April 1, 2017 through March 31, 2018. As part of our current audit, we compared the MMARS data to source documentation (financial data provided by DFG) from the audit period. We also reviewed selected security management controls established by DFG for access to MMARS, to ensure that they addressed security awareness and personal security controls.
Based on the results of these data reliability assessment procedures, we determined that the information obtained for our audit period was sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our audit work.
| Date published: | March 17, 2020 |
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