Reports

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in upheaval to the economy and government services. Ulster County needed to address the questions of people and organizations during the pandemic as it related to public health concerns. To address public questions and concerns, Ulster County established a COVID hotline. Despite allocating significant resources to promotion and widening the scope of the Service Center, it still receives few calls. The call volume does not seem to align with the staffing and additional resources being allocated to operate a separate unit of government. This downtime could...

Our audit sought to determine if unemployment claims filed in the name of Ulster County employees were handled in accordance with current law and Ulster County policy. Our audit revealed that the Personnel Department properly identified fraudulent unemployment claims and challenged those claims. In addition, the Personnel Department staff appropriately notified the Sheriff’s Department and the Information Systems Department about the potential unemployment insurance fraud. However, it appears that some employees may not have been notified by the Personnel Department that they were the victims...

Our audit objective was to answer the following questions: (1) What is Kansas’ process for distributing COVID relief funding?; and (2) Have Kansas’ distributions of COVID relief funding been appropriate? The scope of our work included examining the distribution process for CARES Act and American Rescue Plan Act funding. Additionally, we evaluated a sample of CARES Act expenditures made in 42 Kansas counties.

Our audit objective was to answer the question: what entities received Connectivity Emergency Response Grants and where were they located? We found that the Kansas Department of Commerce (Commerce) awarded $48.5 million in Connectivity Emergency Response Grant funds through 66 grants to all seven regions in Kansas with the largest amounts going to South Central, Southwest, and Northeast Kansas. We also found that Commerce denied some applications through its review process.

The objective of this audit was to determine theeffects of COVID-19 and the events of January 6, 2021, on the CHOBr Project.

This report is a summary of the costs related to responding to the pandemic that the Ulster County Comptroller’s Office was able to aggregate from existing reported financial and personnel data for 2020. The County continues to incur substantial costs in the current year 2021, many of which are offset by pandemic related revenue streams, such as the cost of operating vaccination clinics. We have reviewed the 2020 expenditures to assist in both improving the accounting for these costs and potentially identifying and obtaining revenues to offset these costs.