Like a teen who’s told repeatedly to tend to his homework – or simply clean up his room – Colorado’s bureaucracy has a stubborn habit of ignoring its auditor. That’s right; the Office of the State Auditor – the state government agency that finds and tracks lapses by other state agencies and recommends solutions – often gets put off, waved off or even ignored.

A headline last week by our news affiliate Colorado Politics said it all: “State auditor finds state agencies’ delays in implementing audit recommendations run five years or more.” The auditor’s annual report, released late last month, found nearly four dozen serious recommendations haven’t been implemented.

Think about what that stands to do to the taxpaying public’s level of confidence in state government.

Of more than 100 audit recommendations unimplemented at wide-ranging agencies, 46 were classified as high priority due to the seriousness of the problems identified – or because they haven’t been unimplemented for three years or longer.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise the agencies with the largest number – 17 – of serious, unimplemented recommendations were within the governor’s office. Two of those unaddressed recommendations dated back a decade, and a third was first reported in 2014.

As noted by Colorado Politics, six of the most serious were designated as “material weakness,” the most serious level of internal control weakness.

A material weakness leads to concerns by the auditor that there is, as the report states, a “reasonable possibility of a material misstatement to the entity’s financial statements or of material noncompliance with a federal program requirement that will not be prevented, or detected and corrected, in a timely manner.”

Two of the oldest recommendations involved information technology controls within the Colorado Unemployment Benefits System, the Colorado Automated Tax System and the Colorado Labor and Employment Applicant Resource system.

In other words, the state dishing out and taking in revenue. No need to take those seriously, right?

Some findings involving those same systems even dated to 2009 and the administration of then-Gov. Bill Ritter – three governors ago.

The question that’s so obvious you’re almost afraid to ask is, of course – why haven’t the problems raised by repeated audits been fixed? The short answer is it involves the bureaucracy. So, there is no short answer.

But remarks from the auditor’s annual report – regarding the unaddressed findings on information technology controls – shed at least some light on the unimplemented recommendations in general.

It seems that due to “lack of ownership and clear delineation of roles and responsibilities between the Department (of Labor) and (Office of Information Technology), it was unable to implement the outstanding Fiscal Year 2009 recommendation subparts.”

Which is to say it’s a matter of figuring out who’s got the ball. And who’s on first. And from 2009 up through this year, they still don’t know.

State auditor Kerri Hunter told Colorado Politics that if issues continue to persist with recommendations that have not been implemented, “we have a responsibility to continue to report it and be transparent about what we’re finding.”

Meaning, the auditors can’t enforce. They only can keep nagging.

And the bureaucracy can keep ignoring.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board