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Figure 4: Contract Review Issues
| APA Request or Revised Procedure | Response to Request | KSU Issue or Limitations |
|---|
| Original Request:
Copies of all contracts in place at any time during the examination period and a report of all contract payments made by KSU during the same period. | No records were provided. | KSU is unable to fulfill this request as it has not consistently maintained a central repository of its contracts. Additionally, KSU’s accounting system is unable to produce a contract payment report or a contractor report. |
| Revised Request Due to Limitations and Issues Identified:
A copy of each contract in place during the same period that the former General Counsel was aware of, had custody of, and/or currently retained in the contract repository. | Former General Counsel provided 173 contracts, including personal service contracts, MOAs, property leases, Information Technology contracts and various statements of work. | •Not all contracts from the period were placed in KSU’s central repository by the former General Counsel, her staff, or the Purchasing Director.
•At some point, between November 2019 and October 2020, KSU lost an unknown quantity of electronic procurement documents loaded into KSU’s previous contract repository system after KSU failed to pay its bill and the vendor locked them out of the system. Some of these documents exist in hardcopy around campus, but the electronic collection of documents was never recovered. |
| 2nd Revised Request Due to Limitations and Issues Identified:\nA report of all payments made to a single vendor during the examination period receiving more than $10,000 in a single fiscal year, by vendor and fiscal year. | No such report was provided. | Report not possible as KSU staff had difficulty running such a specific report from the Banner accounting system. |
| Revised Procedure Due to Numerous Issues Identified:\nReview general vendor payment history files to identify vendors paid 40,000 or more in asingle year.nNote:40,000 is the threshold triggering the formal bid process.\nThrough this process an additional 113 potential vendors were identified for which services may have required a contract. Additionally, auditors identified through KSU emails, another 12 vendors for which inquiry would be made. | Former General Counsel offered responses for 41 of 125 vendors. Responses included:
•Nothing available for 12 vendors.
•14 contracts (in various stages: complete, not signed, draft, etc.)
•5 Contract addendums, renewals, or extensions.
•8 settlement agreements.
•1 employment contract.
•1 Lease. | Limitation exists in this approach as payments in KSU’s accounting system do not always reference the related contract and some portion of the cumulative amount paid to the vendor may have been for services or products outside of a contract. |
Requests for supporting documentation for selected credit card and store charge account expenditures remained outstanding for over two months. After the first month, documentation provided included purchase orders associated with select store charge accounts, but no other support. Over the next month documentation trickled in. Eventually, auditors were permitted to go onsite at KSU to manually search through boxes of records to try to find the requested supporting documentation. Through this search, twenty-two documents related to the American