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Committee adopts technical fix and advances bill expanding auditor authority over lost or stolen state property
Summary
The Senate General Fund Committee adopted a technical amendment and gave a favorable report to SB163, a bill that requires agencies to report lost or stolen property within 30 days and authorizes the state auditor to investigate missing or damaged property without additional staff or funding.
Senator Jones said the Senate General Fund Committee adopted a technical amendment and gave SB163 a favorable report after debate and clarification on how the measure would work.
The bill requires state agencies to report lost, missing or stolen property within 30 days and authorizes the state auditor’s office to investigate those reports. The amendment adopted at the committee meeting restored language referencing the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind and the State Library Service that had been inadvertently removed during drafting.
Senator Jones said the amendment was a drafting correction and moved its adoption. He described the bill as tightening procedures for recovering or accounting for state property after examples of missing equipment, including one instance he described as $20,000 in computer equipment that was damaged and unrecoverable.
The State Auditor, who spoke to the committee, said the office can handle the bill’s requirements without additional staff or funding. “We do not need any additional employees nor any additional funding to do anything in this bill,” the auditor told the committee, and said the office would limit investigative work to loss or theft of state property under a newly named Department of Property Investigations.
The bill also allows alternative audit methods so that audits need not require physical presence in secure facilities (for example, certain corrections or youth services locations), and it would permit the auditor to raise the inventory audit threshold once every four years to keep pace with inflation; the current threshold cited in the discussion is $500. The sponsor and the auditor said the change is intended to prevent inventory rolls from ballooning as inflation reduces the real value of the threshold.
Committee members adopted the technical amendment by roll call and later moved the bill forward with a favorable committee report.
SB163 moves next to the Senate floor for further consideration.
