Audit: All but $100,000 in West Haven pandemic spending eligible

This week, however, auditing firm CohnReznick released an assessment to the state Office of Policy and Management determining that the city's ineligible CRF expenditures totaled $100,736, nearly $800,000 less than first thought.

In its Jan. 30 report, CohnReznick provided assessments of the ineligible expenditures of 15 Connecticut municipalities. In a letter to state auditors John Geragosian and Clark Chapin, OPM Chief Administrative Officer Yvonne Addo said CohnReznick developed an audit methodology that determined those 15 municipalities — including West Haven — "(exhibited) potential expense irregularities" in their CRF expenditures.

"After reviewing a preliminary draft report of the fifteen (15) identified municipalities with expenditures identified as not meeting CRF expenditure requirements, OPM elected to contact these municipalities to provide them with a time-limited opportunity to reassign questioned expenditures to other allowable CRF expense categories," Addo wrote in her Feb. 1 letter. "Thereafter, such municipalities confirmed to OPM that they had reassigned the expenditures to allowable CRF expenses."

A spokesman for OPM said the department had no comment beyond Addo's letter to the state auditors.

Rossi, City Council President Peter Massaro and Finance Director Scott Jackson did not immediately respond to a reques for comment.

Councilwoman Bridgette Hoskie, D-1, the council's Finance Committee chairwoman, said it was "unfortunate that the first report was published with what appears to be some major flaws." She said she would wait for the city's audit report from its independent auditor before commenting further.

According to the Jan. 30 report, $89,487 of the $100,736 in ineligible expenses was related to payroll. Although that report does not name any current or former employees, a list of ineligible expenditures in that report match up with overtime payments made to salaried department heads with CRF funds. Rossi had defended the payments as being compensatory payments for City Hall employees working beyond their paid hours without taking time off. In addition to the $80,297 in compensatory payments, which auditors found either did not support hours worked, did not identify the activities performed, did not match up to the amounts submitted or some combination of the three, eight other payments to employees totaling roughly $9,000 could not be reconciled as eligible with proper documentation.

Additionally, the CohnReznick report determined that, of the $978,431 in CRF payments reviewed for the second report, a $4,239 payment for storm cleanup and beach fence repair and more than $7,000 in payments to two independent contractors for whom documentation could not prove performed work eligible under grant requirements.

Since the release of the initial forensic audit report last April, Jackson has provided the City Council with updates on his correspondence with CohnReznick auditors on the report released this week. He said he would not know the total amount of ineligible expenditures until the release of the report, but he expressed confidence that he had found ample documentation in the city's vault to reconcile many of the expenditures rendered ineligible in last April's forensic audit report.

Last month, Jackson raised concerns about how long CohnReznick was taking to release its report, as the city's independent auditing firm was withholding its audit report of the 2022 fiscal year pending the release of CohnReznick's report. Without that audit, Jackson said there would be negative consequences for the city when bond anticipation notes are due in March.