Audit: Nuke agency not doing adequate job awarding contracts

Friday, Dec. 15, 2000 | 10:35 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The state Agency for Nuclear Waste may have misspent $15,500 and still isn't doing an adequate job in awarding contracts in the study of Yucca Mountain, a legislative audit says.

The audit, released Thursday, said, "The majority of contracts that we reviewed either did not have adequate cost analyses prepared or did not have evidence that the contractors' qualifications were verified or were otherwise determined to be acceptable."

It said the agency ordered more than $23,000 of office supplies, furnishings and equipment during the last two weeks of June 1999, using emergency contingency funds. This is the end of the fiscal year when money must be spent or it reverts to the state treasury.

The audit said, "About $15,500 of these expenditures do not appear to fall within statutory requirements for the use of contingency funds." Items purchased included desks, chairs, bookcases, decorative wall atlases, alarm clocks, a suede pad holder, monogrammed bookends, a decorative millennium calendar and picture frames."

The bookends had the monogram of Agency Director Robert Loux. Trudy Stanford, an accountant in the agency, told the Legislative Audit Committee that she was the one who ordered the monogrammed bookends. "I didn't think it was outrageous but in retrospect I would not do it again."

Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, a longtime critic of the agency, said the same deficiencies in the office "keep repeating itself. I would like to see corrective action. This is similar to what the federal government found."

Neal said he wished Loux was present but the director was in Washington, D.C. He told Stanford, "The way you award contracts is done loosely. I find that appalling."