Fed report: West Virginia lacked oversight of opioid grants

The report, released Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General, is titled “West Virginia Lacked Effective Oversight of its Opioid Response Grants.”

The grants included the Opioid State Targeted Response and the State Opioid Response (SOR) grants, both of which are intended to “increase access to treatment, reduce unmet treatment needs and reduce opioid overdose-related deaths.”

The state’s issues occurred because it did not have “adequate procedures in place for how to manage and store subrecipient progress reports or service data and did not follow its own policy for requesting and reviewing supporting documentation for grant expenses from subrecipients,” according to the report.

Additionally, the state did not have adequate procedures in place to “determine whether it met SOR grant program goals.”

The procedures were inadequate because West Virginia did not require subrecipients to collect the needed data to determine whether goals were being met, according to the report.

West Virginia lacked effective control and accountability for federal funds while implementing the Fiscal Year 2020 SOR grant, according to the report.

Specifically, the state did not adequately safeguard federal funds, and its federal financial report did not accurately reflect expenditures, according to the report.

According to the report, these issues occurred because:

• West Virginia program managers approved advanced payments even though subrecipients were not expending their funds.
• West Virginia did not separate Fiscal Year 2020 SOR expenses from the Fiscal Year 2018 SOR expenses.
• West Virginia did not finalize the closeout of subrecipient grants until after the federal financial reports were due.

The report includes a number of recommendations for the state in order to improve its “accountability of federal funds.”

Officials with West Virginia Department of Human Services’ Bureau of Behavioral Health (BBH) “concurred with all” of the recommendations and provided information on additional steps taken, the report says.

“The BBH concurs with the five recommendations reflected within the report,” said West Virginia Department of Human Services Secretary Dr. Cynthia Persily in the agency’s included response.

“A lack of consistency in the staff administering the programs” was among the issues the state Department of Human Services identified as contributing factors to the lack of oversight regarding the funds.

“Added to the recurring changes in staff, the BBH’s relatively small size and vacancy rates during the time of implementation resulted in many instances where projects were transitioned to different individuals numerous times,” Persily said in the response. “We believe that this is the largest concern related to the identified breakdowns in internal controls and the inability of staff to follow established policies of the department.”

The state Department of Human Services had not responded to a request for additional comments from WV News as of press time.