Although the Authority recently adopted contract management policies to help ensure that it monitors its contracts and controls costs, it lacks an effective organizational structure to implement them. Under its current structure, the Authority's contract managers experience high rates of turnover and receive little oversight. Further, they generally serve as contract managers in addition to their other professional responsibilities. Although the RDP consultants assist in contract management, they may not always have the State's best interests as their primary motivation.
Likely in part as a result of these weaknesses in the Authority's contract management structure, we identified significant problems in its management of its contracts. We reviewed a selection of engineering and other service contracts to assess the Authority's compliance with its policies and procedures most directly relevant to controlling costs and ensuring value: invoice review, deliverables monitoring, and change management. We found that although the contract managers complied to varying degrees with the invoice review procedures, they consistently did not document the receipt or evaluation of contractor deliverables, nor did they independently evaluate the need for contract changes that added cost and time. In fact, the contract managers' lack of documented, independent review prevented us from reaching conclusions about the Authority's effectiveness in assessing the quality, timeliness, or cost of the work performed under these contracts. Without such documentation, the Authority cannot demonstrate that the hundreds of millions of dollars it has spent to date on the selected contracts-including for cost overruns in the form of amendments-has been necessary or appropriate.
Similarly, our review of the Authority's construction contracts found that it has implemented a construction invoicing process capable of significantly limiting the risk that it overpays these contractors for the work they perform. However, the Authority has not provided reliable monitoring of the oversight firms that are responsible for managing this invoicing process. Further, it has only recently developed formal monitoring to evaluate the performance of the oversight firms.