Alaska’s state government is increasingly failing to keep up with requirements in state and federal law, the state’s nonpartisan auditor told a group of lawmakers on Wednesday.
Legislative Auditor Kris Curtis said she identified dozens of accounting and compliance issues in her agency’s most recent audit. Those range from the Department of Corrections overspending its budget to the Division of Public Assistance failing to process SNAP and Medicaid applications on time.
Curtis told the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee that the issue has gotten progressively worse over the past decade. All told, Curtis said her team identified 85 issues in the 2024 fiscal year audit. That’s about double what her team found a decade ago.
She offered a few reasons why.
"What we're seeing is vacancies, we're seeing turnover, we're seeing poor training, we're seeing a lack of written procedures," Curtis said in an interview.
Employee turnover and hiring have been areas of particular interest for legislators seeking to reinstitute a pension system for state employees.
Among the issues Curtis spotlighted are errors in the state’s procurement process. She said her team pulled samples of state purchases across various departments and found that roughly a third failed to comply with state rules. That means they either didn’t follow state law, or didn’t maintain the documentation backing up those purchases, Curtis said.
"I think one of the biggest concerns is making sure the state is obtaining the best possible price," she said.
Curtis found the state also failed to bill the federal government for nearly $280 million in pandemic-era federal aid funding in a timely manner — and that means the state lost out on more than $9 million worth of interest it could have earned in the meantime.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration disputes some of the auditor’s findings, chalking them up to differences in interpreting state and federal law. Curtis says the report is meant to help state agencies improve and spotlight areas that lawmakers can help them do so.
