An Audit Report on Selected Contracts at the Parks and Wildlife Department
August 2014
Report Number 14-042
Overall Conclusion
The Parks and Wildlife Department (Department) should strengthen its contracting processes in the areas of procurement, payment, and monitoring. Audits of two contracts identified the following:
- The TxParks reservations and property management system (TxParks) contract with The Active Network, Inc. executed in 2008. The Department did not have documentation showing that it complied with procurement requirements and appropriately scored vendor proposals for its contract to develop the TxParks reservations and property management system for state parks. Therefore, auditors could not verify whether the Department selected the vendor that provided best value. In procuring that contract, the Department also inappropriately disqualified three vendors whose proposals met the minimum requirements in the Department's solicitation. It also did not document whether another vendor submitted required financial statements; without those financial statements, the Department should have disqualified that vendor.
The Department established segregation of duties for its payments to the TxParks contractor, but it did not follow its payment process consistently. The Department did not have a supporting invoice for one $64,167 payment. In addition, the Department did not track contractor payments that were associated with one contract amendment and, as a result, it overpaid the contractor $2,182. The Department also paid the contractor $1,069 in interest because it made payments late. The Department did not have documentation showing that $160,909 in payments were properly approved.
The Department complied with most requirements for planning and forming the TxParks contract.
- The License Sales System implementation and management (License Sales System) contract with Gordon-Darby, Inc. executed in 2012. The Department improved its contracting processes and complied with most requirements for planning, procuring, and forming the License Sales System contract for the sale of hunting and fishing licenses. In addition, the Department appropriately processed payments for that contract.
The Department monitored both contracts audited, but it should strengthen its monitoring to help ensure contractor compliance with contract terms. Specifically, the Department did not adequately monitor 7 (41 percent) of 17 contract requirements tested for the TxParks contract and 4 (24 percent) of 17 contract requirements tested for the License Sales System contract. The Department did not perform an adequate risk assessment to identify which requirements it should monitor regularly or how it would monitor those requirements.
Auditors communicated other, less significant issues in writing to Department management.