Finding 1226260 (2025-001)

Views of Responsible Officials and Planned Corrective Actions: (Prepared by Cooperative Management) 2025 -001 – Significant Deficiency in Internal Controls The electronic timesheet system used by the Cooperative, which is also used to track vehicle and equipment used by an employee only allows tracking of vehicle/equipment by mileage and/or hour usage, since the trailers owned by the Cooperative do not have a meter to track either mileage and/or hour usage it is not normal business practice to track the trailer usage on the timesheets. There is a comment section on the timesheet where the information can be entered to bypass the system requirement of entering mileage and/or hour usage, in future storm situations, trailer usage will be entered into the comment section of the timesheet. As for the ATV’s and loader/skid steer equipment it is not normal practice to enter those on the timesheet even though they have a meter to track miles and/or hours. In future storm situations, usage for such equipment will be tracked on the timesheet. The basis for including the trailers in question even though they were not tracked on timesheets was that the trailers were used to haul material (poles) that were checked out of inventory. The Cooperative had to change out over 500 poles, the poles had to be hauled at least 45 miles from the Cooperative inventory yard to the job site, the trailers are pulled by specific trucks which the usage of the trucks was documented on timesheets. The trailers were loaded with the poles in the morning, pulled to job site, a pole unloaded at each pole location, returned in the evening when the shift of the employee driving the truck that pulled the trailer was over. Between inventory records and timesheets documenting the trucks pulling the trailers, the Cooperative was able to determine when the trailers were used. The operations manager made note every day of the ATV’s and loader/skid steers that were used and by which employee. That equipment had to be hauled to the job sites which were at least 45 miles away from the office where they are normally kept. The equipment was pulled to the job sites with the assigned trailer (dump trailers) for that equipment in the morning and returned in evening when the employees shift was over. The FEMA representative the Cooperative worked with wanted the force equipment usage in excel format, the directive given to the Cooperative by the FEMA representative was to add the trailers, ATV’s, loader/skid steers to the excel spreadsheet based upon the documentation that was kept by the operations manager, the inventory records and timesheets. The FEMA representative gave the advice that the handwritten documents did not need to be kept once it was added to the excel spreadsheet since that was the document submitted to the FEMA representative, not the timesheets. In future storm situations all handwritten documents will be scanned as a pdf document and electronically kept.