Legislative Fiscal Analyst Yvonne Jamboff told the committee she had identified that the Division of Finance stopped performing quarterly expenditure post audits and said that practice “is in violation of statute,” asking the division to explain why and when it would resume the reviews.

Van Christensen, director of the Division of Finance, said the pause on post audits was a deliberate reallocation of scarce staff to maintain critical operations, including payroll for about 22,000 state employees, vendor payments and the state’s annual financial report. Christensen described a “major exodus” of long-tenured staff and said turnover for seven key accounting positions exceeded 33% over the previous 12 months.

“The post audit function is important,” Christensen said, describing post audits as a control that verifies internal procedures and reduces risks of fraud or misuse. He said the division did not stop the work lightly but reassigned the payroll supervisor (who previously managed post audits) into a payroll role to shore up operations during a learning curve associated with a payroll system and the first-time processing of W-2s from that system.

Christensen said the division received additional funding in the recent legislative session to increase compensation for key accounting roles and to hire new full-time staff; with those hires and training under way, he said the division plans to resume post audits “about the end of this fiscal year, so around June 30 or so.” He added that while he could not absolutely guarantee the timeline, he was “95%” confident the post audits would restart.

The director also described technology and process changes intended to make audits more effective, including a new travel and purchasing-card system that can produce exception reports to target high-risk transactions, and other data-driven tests to improve audit impact with limited staff.

Committee members asked whether the pause on post audits had been communicated previously to the Legislature. Christensen said the staffing and turnover issues were discussed during the division’s funding request, though he was not certain the specific decision to pause post audits had been clearly communicated to legislative committees.

The committee did not take formal action on the matter during the session. Christensen said the division had recently hired a permanent payroll supervisor and expected to transition the previous payroll lead back to post-audit duties as training progressed.