Russell W. Hinton, State Auditor
FOLLOW-UP REVIEW
Animal Protection Program
Department of Agriculture
November 2003
Performance Audit Operations Division 254 Washington St, S.W. Department of Audits and Accounts Atlanta, GA 30334
This is a Follow-up Review of the Performance Audit of the Animal Protection Program released by the Department of Audits in December 2000. This Review was conducted to determine the extent to which the Program has addressed the recommendations presented in that report. A copy of the original report can be obtained through the contact information on the back of this Review.
The Department of Agriculture’s Animal Protection Program is responsible for enforcing the Bird Dealer Licensing Act, which protects humans and livestock from the transmission of disease by pet birds. The Program is also responsible for enforcing portions of the Animal Protection Act, which prevents unhealthy animals from being sold and protects animals from abuse and neglect while awaiting sale or adoption. The Program is responsible for licensing and inspecting bird dealers, pet dealers (including breeders), kennels, and animal shelters. The Program licenses approximately 3,147 facilities.
Program personnel have the authority to conduct inspections, investigate complaints, and cite facilities that are not in compliance with the Program’s standards for providing humane care to animals. Inspectors can order facilities with severe deficiencies or diseased animals to stop the sale of animals or to quarantine the animals. Facilities that continually fail to meet minimum requirements may be called in for a violation hearing in which the steps needed to comply with the standards are explained, or for a settlement conference in which disciplinary action is taken. The Department has the authority to suspend or revoke a facility’s license.
The Program currently has 23 budgeted full-time positions, including 2 field supervisors and 12 inspectors. Inspectors work from home and travel throughout their regions to inspect licensed facilities and to investigate complaints. The Program is totally state-funded with fiscal year 2003 expenditures totaling $729,915; the Program’s fiscal year 2004 budget is $787,460. Both the Bird Dealer Licensing Act and the Animal Protection Act specify that the license fees charged by the Program should be set so that the revenue derived approximates the cost of administering the Program.
Synopsis of the Audit Recommendations
The primary objective of the audit was to determine if the Program was fulfilling its purposes of preventing unhealthy animals from being sold to the public or placed for adoption and protecting animals from abuse and neglect while awaiting sale or adoption. The 2000 review found several areas in which action was needed to improve the program’s effectiveness and efficiency, including compiling data in order to evaluate the Program’s effectiveness, developing a management information system, monitoring inspectors’ work, improving the inspection process, and reducing turnover.
Our review found that the Program has taken steps to improve its operational efficiency and effectiveness.
However, the Program continues to be hampered by its lack of technological resources. For example, the Program’s primary database, the Agriculture Information Retrieval System (AIRS), continues to maintain limited data and provide limited reports for effective management of the Program. The Program also continues to employ outdated processes for sending, receiving, and maintaining programmatic information. Inspectors located throughout the state are not issued computers; as a result, inspectors cannot electronically transmit reports (instead these are sent via
its central office in
regarding recent inspection histories of facilities assigned to them. Each of these points is discussed in more detail below.
Recommendation in 2000: The Department agrees that accurate information should be compiled for evaluating the Program’s overall effectiveness
Current Status: As reported in 2000, the Program did not have complete data for determining its overall effectiveness using the following measures identified in the Governor’s Budget Report:
(1) at least 96% of the licensed facilities inspected will meet the legal standards of humane care, and;
(2) 96% of the facilities cited for not providing humane care will be re-inspected and brought into compliance or will be subjected to license revocation and/or a settlement conference.
The same objectives continue to be in place, however insufficient data is available to determine the extent to which these objectives were met in the fiscal year 2003 and 2004 Governor’s Budget Reports.
Recommendation in 2000: The Department of Agriculture has agreed that a management information system should be developed that would enable the Program to operate in a more efficient and effective manner.
Current Status: As reported in 2000, the Program was dependent on a manual system to keep track of thousands of inspections, reinspections, and complaints associated with approximately 2,200 licensed bird dealers, pet dealers, kennels and animal shelters. The computerized data available at the time did not provide management with the summary data necessary to implement strong internal controls. As a result, it could not ensure that inspections were being conducted as required, that complaints were being investigated in a thorough and timely manner, or that Program inspectors were making optimal use of their work hours.
Our Follow-up Review revealed that the functionality of the Agriculture Information Retrieval System (AIRS) has been somewhat improved since the audit. For example, AIRS is now capable of producing several additional summary reports that can assist in identifying facilities in need of inspection, monitoring inspectors’ work, and identifying various types of recent violations issued in summary form or by facility. However, despite these improvements, there are still limitations to the information that is available for managing the Program and assessing its overall efficiency and effectiveness. These limitations are discussed in more detail throughout the remainder of the report.
Recommendation in 2000: The Department of Agriculture has agreed that a management information system should be developed that would enable the Program to operate in a more efficient and effective manner.
Current Status: As reported in 2000, the Program was dependent on a manual system to keep track of thousands of inspections, reinspections, and complaints associated with approximately 2,200 licensed bird dealers, pet dealers, kennels and animal shelters. The computerized data available at the time did not provide management with the summary data necessary to implement strong internal controls. As a result, it could not ensure that inspections were being conducted as required, that complaints were being investigated in a thorough and timely manner, or that Program inspectors were making optimal use of their work hours.
Our Follow-up Review revealed that the functionality of the Agriculture Information Retrieval System (AIRS) has been somewhat improved since the audit. For example, AIRS is now capable of producing several additional summary reports that can assist in identifying facilities in need of inspection,
monitoring inspectors’ work, and identifying various types of recent violations issued in summary form or by facility. However, despite these improvements, there are still limitations to the information that is available for managing the Program and assessing its overall efficiency and effectiveness.
These limitations are discussed in more detail throughout the remainder of the report.
In its response the follow-up report, Program staff agreed that the lack of adequate technology impedes the tracking of tremendous amounts of incoming information. The Program indicated that updating the Program’s technology is hindered by budgetary constraints, but that it would try to make the office function more efficiently with the technology currently available to it.
Recommendation in 2000: The Animal Protection Program has agreed that it should take steps to improve all phases of the inspection process, from scheduling inspections to following up on violations.
Current Status: At the time of the audit, it was reported that the Program had no summary information or controls needed to ensure that pet dealers and other facilities are being inspected in a timely, thorough, and consistent manner. Specifically, there was no summary data readily available to identify facilities that had not been inspected in the previous calendar year, to determine if inspectors were reasonably consistent in citing facilities for violating Program regulations, or if facilities cited for violations took corrective action as required.
Since the audit, the Program has taken steps to improve its inspection process. For example, as noted earlier, additional query functions have been added to the AIRS database in order to generate summary data. The AIRS database has the ability to run reports that identify facilities that have not been inspected and to summarize the number and types of violations that are issued by each inspector.
The database, however, cannot be used to identify if a facility cited with a notice of violation has been re-inspected. Program management must manually review the files to determine a facility’s re-inspection status. In addition, in order to ensure greater consistency in how inspections are conducted and notice of violation citations are issued, field supervisors are now required to accompany inspectors on their inspections on a weekly rotating schedule. Program staff have also indicated that they are in the process of developing a procedures manual that will provide inspectors with guidelines regarding inspections and issuing violations.
Recommendation in 2000: The Program has agreed that internal controls should be implemented for ensuring that complaints are addressed in a thorough and timely manner.
Current Status: As was reported in 2000, the Program still does not have a computerized system for tracking complaints to ensure that they have been investigated and satisfactorily resolved. Complaints are currently recorded in a Microsoft Access database upon receipt and are then forwarded to an inspector for investigation. The database contains no additional information regarding if or when the complaint was investigated or the outcome of the complaint investigation. As a result, the Program cannot readily determine the status of the complaints it receives or if complaints are investigated within the established timeframes.
Recommendation in 2000: The Program has agreed to implement additional controls for monitoring its inspectors’ work activities.
Current Status: As was reported in 2000, although inspectors’ start and stop times for each inspection are recorded on inspection reports and tracked in AIRS, the Program still has not developed productivity standards for each type of facility inspected. According to Program staff, the procedures manual that is currently being developed will contain timeframes regarding the amount of time that should be spent performing inspections, completing inspection reports, and dealing with complaints. In addition, Program staff indicated that AIRS is used to produce reports on inspectors’ activities and Field Supervisors’ job duties and responsibilities have been revised to specify how inspectors’ work is to be monitored. For example, field supervisors must monitor routine inspections to ensure that they are conducted according to established timeframes and review complaints to ensure that the field staff investigate them within the timeframes outlined by the Program.
Recommendation in 2000: Procedures should be developed to ensure that disciplinary action is taken in a timely manner against facilities that are not providing adequate care to animals.
Current Status: At the time of the audit, the Program conducted multiple re-inspections of facilities that were cited with problems - rather than taking disciplinary action against the facilities for not coming into compliance. In addition, there were no guidelines in place that outlined for Program inspectors when the conditions at a facility warrant disciplinary action, such a settlement conference.
According to documentation provided by the Program, only five settlement conferences were held between August 2001 and February 2003 due to staff turnover and a vacant attorney position. Currently, the Program is working to develop a procedures manual, which will include a violation schedule. A review of the draft violation schedule revealed that the Program is developing guidelines for: the identification of violations; the timeframe that should be given to facilities to correct deficiencies; the timeframe for inspectors to follow-up on corrective action; and, when situations warrant the pursuit of disciplinary action.
However, the violation guidelines do not address facilities that have a history of recurring violations.
Recommendation in 2000: The Program needs to continue to revise its inspection procedures to make more effective utilization of its available resources.
Current Status: As reported in 2000, it was recommended that the Program improve its overall efficiency by prioritizing the frequency of its inspections, reducing the amount of writing required to complete inspection reports, and eliminating redundant inspection forms. Since the time of the audit, the Program has taken steps to reduce the amount of time inspectors spend writing inspection reports. According to Program staff, inspectors have been instructed to stop writing duplicative data in the written portion of the inspection report unless it relates to data needed to verify license fees
paid by the facility (such as a holding capacity and/or gross sales information). A review of 20 inspection reports for facilities in which no significant violations were found revealed that the majority of the reports contained no extraneous or duplicative information in the written portion of the reports. While improvements have been made in this area, the Program needs to improve its overall efficiency by ensuring that inspections are being prioritized according to the potential risk to animals and by eliminating redundant inspection reports.
As noted in the audit, inspections should be focused on those types of facilities that pose the greatest potential risk of disease and inhumane care to animals.
The Program continues to have the same policy of inspecting animal shelters three times per year and all other types of facilities (bird dealers, pet dealers, and kennels) one time per year. This system, however, assigns, the same priority to pet shops and animal breeders despite their different levels of public scrutiny (and, therefore, different levels of risk related to inhumane care.)
Additionally, according to Program staff, inspectors schedule their own inspections and inspections are to be prioritized according to the type of establishment and the relative risk associated with each. The degree to which inspections are being prioritized in this manner, however, could not be determined. The Program’s database does not have the ability to generate a single report showing the inspection history of each facility assigned to each inspector to determine if inspections are appropriately prioritized. According to the Program’s response to our status inquiry, the Program indicated that it is currently reviewing how to best report information about facilities that are licensed as both a pet dealer and a bird dealer in order to minimize the redundancy associated with completing two inspection reports.
In its response to the follow-up report, the Program agreed that it should change its guidelines regarding the frequency with which animal breeding facilities are inspected.
Current Status: The Program has indicated that it has made a commitment to pursuing unlicensed facilities by searching the Internet, newspaper advertisements, the telephone book, and advertisements in kennels and veterinary clinics. However, Program staff were not able to provide documentation regarding unlicensed facilities that have been pursued.
In addition, the pursuit of unlicensed facilities is not included in inspectors’ job descriptions or in the Program’s current procedures manual. According to Program staff, inspectors learn to conduct searches for unlicensed facilities during their training.
In its response to the follow-up report, the Program indicated that it will incorporate the pursuit of unlicensed facilities into the inspectors’ job descriptions and duties identified in their performance review form.
Recommendation in 2000: The Program agrees that steps should be taken to reduce employee turn over.
Current Status: As reported in 2000, the Program had lost seven inspectors in a two-year period and the majority of inspectors had less than two year’s experience. Program management had noted that the primary reason for high turnover of staff was low pay.
Although the starting salary for inspectors has increased 12% (from $19,076 to $21,434 for Inspector 1) and the maximum salary has increased 22% (from $34,020 to $41,401 for Inspector 2) since the audit, the Program has not made progress in retaining employees.
Recommendation in 2000: The Program has agreed that the dollar amount of the license fees should be revised so that, as required by state law, the license revenue approximates the cost of administering the Program.
Current Status: Following the release of the audit report, the Program sought changes to the Program’s license fee structure contained in the Department’s regulations. Although the license fee structure was revised upward in October 2001 to include more facilities in the higher fee range, the Program’s revenues from license fees still do not approximate the total cost of administering the Program as required by law.
In fiscal year 2002 the Program’s revenues from license fees totaled $255,654, an amount equal to only 38% of its $666,737 in expenditures. Based on the Program’s fiscal year 2002 actual expenditures, the revenue derived from license fees still would not approximate the cost of the Program even if every licensee were charged the maximum fee allowed under the law ($200).
For additional information, please contact Paul E. Bernard, Director, Performance Audit Operations Division, at 404.657.5220. Copies of this Follow-up Review and the original Performance Audit of the Animal Protection Program can be obtained by calling the number above or on our website: http://www.audits.state.ga.us/internet/pao/followup.html
bravenet.com