LIHUE — The Kauai County Council on Wednesday authorized a series of audits aimed at evaluating management and procedures in the Kauai Fire Department and the Department of Public Works.
A motion to approve the audits was made and seconded, followed by a briefing from Council Chair Arryl Kaneshiro, who explained why the audits may be forthcoming.
“The mayor has mentioned many times about him wanting to proactively pursue audits,” Kaneshiro said. “On the council end, we have always had an audit budget, and it’s been our privy to actually go out and do some audits. I think this was a result of that.”
There are four proposed audits, one to address concerns about management and overtime issues in the fire department, with the remaining three focused on DPW.
An audit of DPW’s Roads Division is proposed to ensure the department is prepared to appropriately spend funds generated by the general excise tax. Another would review complaints about low morale in the DPW’s Solid Waste Division. And a third audit would examine how the department has awarded federal funds related to disaster relief.
Kaneshiro said the four items scheduled to be audited will go out to procurement after their approval at the Wednesday meeting. Once they go out to procurement, the council will make the decision whether they want to spend the money on the audits, or if they have the funds budgeted for the endeavor.
“If we want to go ahead with four audits, we’ll go ahead with four audits,” Kaneshiro said. “If we don’t have the money for it, we’ll decide what our top priority is.”
Councilmember Mason Chock asked whether the audits would be a joint endeavor, or if the mayor’s office would conduct the audits.
“I think there is an overlap because, in the information that they sent us, I believe three of these were things that admin was interested in auditing also,” Kaneshiro said in response to Chock. “But as far as the audit process goes, we’re going to be running the process. We’re going to be procuring finding the auditors and then the auditors are going to be on their own asking the admin the questions based on the scope.”
Council Vice Chair Ross Kagawa added that he hopes the administration would see the audit process has started and therefore would not do an internal audit on its own.
“I guarantee you it would draw criticism,” Kagawa said. “But for me, it’s no secret that the top priority would be the fire department and the spiking.”
Kagawa added that there is already evidence that spiking has occurred, given “actual evidence as provided by another agency.” The other agency is Employee Retirement System data, which he provided to the councilmembers and citizens in attendance.
Kagawa called the three audits the administration wants done, added with the fourth the council has planed, are a “no-brainer.”
“We should get those done if mutually agreed upon,” Kagawa said, later adding that the fire department audit needs to tell what went wrong, who did wrong, and what we can do from here.
“Some fraud has been committed,” Kagawa said. “I look to you, county attorney. Can we get some money back?”
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Ryan Collins, county reporter, can be reached at 245-0424 or rcollins@thegardenisland.com.
Blow hard and doing nothing that’s the County of Kauai’s greatest character trait. All they do is bump their gums and do nothing. How many audits prior to hear audits were addressed with legitimate reprimand and or firings? None that has been announced but TGI so there’s your answer. Nothing will be done and business as usual for these do nothings and another Dept like the fire dept will start to spike their retirement. The retirement spiking was addressed years ago and nothing was done and now these crooks get away with 4 times the amount of retirement they did in 5 years. These guys work only 8 days In a month and have second jobs and they still greedy. GREED in county of Kauai depts is an illness with no cure.
Why is the KPD being protected from these audits? “Mike & Perry” are the very ones that have miss managed a department to the ground.