Audit of the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

An overview of the purpose and process of auditing the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office.

Overview

In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor has conducted a performance audit of certain activities of the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) for the period July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2019.

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 a list of our audit objectives, indicating each question we intended our audit to answer and the conclusion we reached regarding each objective.

Objective	Conclusion
Were the non-payroll expenses that HCSO incurred supported and directly applicable to the office’s mission?	Yes
Did HCSO administer its contracting process for goods and services in accordance with its policies?	Yes
Did HCSO ensure that the 30 employees who were paid the most overtime were paid for hours that they worked?	Yes

 

To achieve our objectives, we gained an understanding of the internal controls we determined to be relevant to the objectives by reviewing agency policies and procedures, as well as conducting inquiries with HCSO’s staff and management. We evaluated the design and effectiveness of controls over non-payroll expenses, contracting, and staff overtime and determined whether they operated as intended during the audit period.

Additionally, we performed the procedures described below.

Non-Payroll Expenses

We obtained HCSO state appropriation expenditure data from the Massachusetts Management Accounting and Reporting System (MMARS) and selected a statistical random sample of 30 non-payroll expenditures (totaling $23,244) from a population of 7,812 (totaling $16,176,239) that HCSO paid during our audit period, using a 95% confidence level and a 10% tolerable error rate. We reviewed supporting documentation, such as invoices and purchase orders, and analyzed it to determine whether the expenditures were supported and directly applicable to HCSO’s mission.

Contracting Process

We obtained HCSO state appropriation expenditure information from MMARS and summarized it by fiscal year and vendor for our audit period. We selected a nonstatistical judgmental sample of 15 instances (totaling $1,435,244) from a population of 97 instances (totaling $11,988,479) where payments made to vendors during a fiscal year within our audit period were equal to or above the amounts specified in HCSO policies as requiring that a contract be executed. We reviewed the procurement files for these vendors to assess whether goods and services were procured in accordance with HCSO’s policies.

Overtime

We obtained records from MMARS of all overtime paid for time worked during the audit period from HCSO’s main state appropriations. From the 641 employees who were paid overtime during the audit period, we identified a population of 30 who incurred the most overtime and punched in and out¹ during that period. These 30 employees represented a population of 1,562 unique payments, which totaled $470,299. We then used a nonstatistical approach to select a sample of 60 payments (2 payments of overtime during the audit period for each of the 30 employees, for a total of 60), totaling $60,523. We reviewed the employees’ daily punch data for the instances selected to determine whether employees were paid overtime for hours that were worked.

We used a combination of nonstatistical and statistical sampling approaches for our testing and did not project our results to the entire population.

Data Reliability

In 2018, we performed a data reliability assessment of MMARS 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 tested controls in place over HCSO’s security awareness training and personnel security. Further, to determine the completeness of invoice data, we randomly selected 20 invoices from HCSO’s files and matched the information on the invoices to the data in MMARS. We also selected 20 transactions from MMARS and traced information related to the transactions, including dates, amounts, and vendor names, to physical documentation (invoices) for accuracy. We determined that the information obtained from MMARS for our audit period was sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our audit work.

We determined the reliability of data obtained from the state’s Self-Service Time and Attendance (SSTA) system by performing interviews and observations and testing certain information technology controls, such as security management, segregation of duties, and access controls. To determine the accuracy of the SSTA data, we selected 40 SSTA payroll records and traced the hours on the records to original source documents. We determined that the data from SSTA were sufficiently reliable for the purposes of this audit. (SSTA is administered by the Human Resource / Compensation Management System, not HCSO.)

Conclusion

Our audit revealed no significant instances of noncompliance in any of the areas we audited that must be reported under generally accepted government auditing standards.

1.     Some employees are part of a task force, work off site in the community, and are not required to punch in and out.

Date published:	May 14, 2020