The PA Auditor General’s office is out with an audit of five economic development programs administered by the Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) that is quite critical (the audit states that “…only 56 percent of the businesses awarded assistance from 2007-2010 created and/or retained all the jobs pledged in exchange for the assistance provided to them”). That basically picks up where the 2007 audit conducted by the previous Auditor General left off in his examination of the Opportunity Grant program.
Tis a joyous season at hand, so rather than go further into the new audit and DCED’s response to it, the fact that the audit says the Department does not have performance goals, does not look at job numbers, that job numbers are just one piece of impact, but that they don’t have a way to measure impact, let’s focus on one area where the Auditor General and the Department seem to agree: the Department penalized recipients that failed to deliver.
In 2007, the Auditor General’s office found that though DCED had levied $26.2 million in penalties related to the Opportunity Grant program it had only collected $3.3 million. In the 2014 audit the AG’s office found that $7.5 million had been levied in penalties and $4.3 million collected related to the Opportunity Grant program. Overall, the penalties levied to amount collected for three of the five DCED programs was $10.8 million and the total collected by the end of June 2014 was $4.5 million.
