The nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor found that the Behavioral Health Administration hadn’t fixed problems revealed in its 2021 audit.
ST PAUL, Minn. — Another sobering report by the Office of the Legislative Auditor — this one concerning the Behavioral Health Administration within the Department of Human Services, which issues grants to providers treating mental health and drug and alcohol addiction, close to $200 million each year.
The nonpartisan OLA found many examples of BHA mismanaging taxpayer money and then fabricating documents to try to cover their tracks in a “systemic effort.”
One outrageous finding: the auditors approached a grantee who was paid $ 672,000 for one month of work without any information on what they did. And the audit says the grant manager who paid it then left DHS a few days later and became a paid consultant for that company.
There were multiple examples of the BHA issuing grants to one or more organizations without the required bidding process.
“So what we saw is there were multiple entities that could have been eligible, and they chose not to provide justification for why they were picking those,” said one member of the audit team.
Legislative Auditor Judy Randall says she was most shocked that, during the audit, multiple DHS managers backdated or created new documents.
“Frankly, in the 27-plus years I’ve been with the OLA, I’ve never seen this before. I will say we’ve had suspicions periodically, but we’ve never been able to prove it, to document it, and we did in this case. And it’s very troubling,” Randall said.
Temporary DHS Commissioner Shireen Gandhi’s response:
“I was shocked to hear this information in the exit conference. And it is absolutely unacceptable that any staff would provide anything other than accurate representation of the work done to an auditor,” she said.