Auditors find misuse of stimulus money in Calif.
By GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 11:43 a.m.
FRESNO, Calif. — Officials in the heart of recession-battered central California misspent about $1 million in federal stimulus funds that were supposed to help adults and teenagers find jobs, state auditors said Tuesday.
California's Inspector General Laura Chick said the Tulare County Workforce Investment Board used nearly $1 million in Recovery Act funds to pay for their own rent and utility bills, when the bulk of the money should have gone to finding youth summer jobs.
The board got $6.8 million through a package aimed at reinvigorating the country's summer youth employment program, which had gone dormant for a decade.
"It's really inappropriate to be charging rent when you're not providing services," said Chick, who was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to watch over California's stimulus funds. "I want the word going up and down the state: Don't do this."
Chick says the board - the rural county's lead job-training agency - also failed to follow basic accounting practices.
The board's executive director, Adam Peck, said Tuesday the agency was following Chick's recommendations, but said he believed the $1 million figure was too high. He said that only about $550,000 in stimulus funds was spent on overhead, following guidelines laid out in a previous accounting procedure.
"It wasn't as if we saw this as an opportunity to use stimulus funds to pay for our overhead," Peck said. "We were using the allocation procedure we already had in place, and we had never received direction to do it differently."
Many of the accounting discrepancies have been corrected and a portion of the money is being returned to stimulus accounts to be reallocated to next year's summer youth program, he said.
The Workforce Investment Act youth summer program briefly came under questioning last fall. The Government Accountability Office warned that despite its admirable goals, the government's plans to measure the program's success were haphazard and risked yielding few new opportunities for needy teens.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said overall, the program had succeeded by increasing job skills and career readiness for youth. The six-week program in Tulare County served 1,812 youth.
Chick's team of auditors next plans to scrutinize workforce boards in Oakland and San Francisco.
The Associated Press
