Audit of the MDAA Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

An explanation of what this audit examined and how it was conducted.

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 Massachusetts District Attorney Association (MDAA) for the period July 1, 2014 through June 30, 2017.

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; the conclusion we reached regarding each objective; and, if applicable, where each objective is discussed in the audit findings.

Objective	Conclusion
Was the funding that was provided in line item 0340-2117 in the General Appropriation Acts for fiscal years 2015, 2016, and 2017 (Chapter 165 of the Acts of 2014, Chapter 46 of the Acts of 2015, and Chapter 133 of the Acts of 2016, respectively) spent for its specific purpose?	Not all; see Finding 1
Did the use of the funds that were provided in line item 0340-2117 improve the retention rate of full-time Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) with more than three years of experience?	Yes
Did the funding that was provided in line item 0340-6653 in the General Appropriation Acts for fiscal years 2016 and 2017 (Chapter 46 of the Acts of 2015 and Chapter 133 of the Acts of 2016, respectively) result in the minimum annual salary exceeding $45,000 for a full-time ADA?	Yes
Were the funds that were provided in line item 0340-6653 spent for their specific purpose?	Yes

To achieve our audit objectives, we gained an understanding of MDAA’s operations and evaluated its internal control environment related to the administration of both the ADA Retention Fund and the Salary Reserve Fund. We reviewed applicable authoritative guidance and MDAA’s most recent internal control plan. We also obtained and reviewed all 55 Interdepartmental Service Agreements between MDAA and all 11 District Attorney’s Offices and tested to ensure that proper signatures were obtained and that the allocation plans for how the appropriated funds were to be distributed were sent to the House and Senate Committees on Ways and Means as required before any funding was distributed to the District Attorney’s Offices.

 

ADA Retention Fund

• We obtained expenditure reports from the Massachusetts Management Accounting and Reporting System (MMARS, the centralized state accounting system used by all state agencies and departments for processing all financial transactions) for each fiscal year in our audit period and used Audit Command Language software to analyze expenditure data to determine whether retention funding was used for the sole purpose of providing payroll incentives to ADAs with more than three years of experience.
• We interviewed, and obtained testimonial evidence from, MDAA’s management and the chief financial officers (CFOs) at three District Attorney’s Offices as to why they did not expend retention funds allocated to them in fiscal year 2015. Further, we obtained email correspondence from the CFOs to the state’s Executive Office for Administration and Finance confirming that retention funds for fiscal year 2015 were used to offset midyear funding cuts to District Attorney’s Offices’ budgets.
• We interviewed 6 of the 11 District Attorney’s Offices’ senior managers to determine the impact that the retention fund distributions had on improving the offices’ ability to retain ADAs with three or more years of experience.
• We analyzed 100% of payroll data processed through the Human Resource Compensation Management System (HR/CMS)² for each District Attorney’s Office during the audit period to determine whether the funding provided by the appropriation was given only to ADAs with three or more years of experience. We analyzed HR/CMS data to identify any ADAs with more than three years of experience who transferred to other state agencies during our audit period.

 

Salary Reserve Fund

We obtained MMARS expenditure reports and payroll data for each fiscal year of our audit and performed a test by comparing the minimum starting salaries that were paid to ADAs during fiscal years 2016 and 2017 to determine whether each of the District Attorney’s Offices used the money it received from the Salary Reserve Fund during these fiscal years for its intended purpose of increasing the starting minimum annual salary level for ADAs to $45,000 by the close of fiscal year 2017.

Based on OSA’s most recent data-reliability assessment of MMARS³ and our current comparison of source documentation regarding expenditures with MMARS information, we determined that the information obtained from MMARS for our audit period was sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our audit work. To verify the integrity of data used from HR/CMS, we selected a total of 16 payroll expenditures from the data files extracted from HR/CMS and compared those expenditures to payroll record spreadsheets maintained at a District Attorney’s Office. Further, we traced 10 payroll records processed through the District Attorney’s Office and compared them to HR/CMS data we extracted for this audit. We determined that the information obtained for our audit period was sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our audit work.

2. HR/CMS is the Commonwealth’s official payroll system.

3. In 2014, OSA performed a data-reliability assessment of MMARS. As part of this assessment, we tested general information-technology controls for system design and effectiveness. We tested for accessibility of programs and data, as well as system change management policies and procedures for applications, jobs, and infrastructure.

Date published:	April 24, 2018