'Waste and abuse' in Essex County's $40M COVID vaccine rollout, state investigation says

Essex County's $40 million COVID vaccination program had so little oversight that it led to overpayment to vendors, public bidding violations and questionable payments to workers who held other public jobs, according to an investigative report released Tuesday.

In one instance, a vendor that made robocalls to Essex residents was overpaid $110,000, which no one noticed until investigators caught it. In another case, a vendor was paid $130,000 to work for the vaccination program over 11 months, but the county health officer did not know who this person was or what she did.

While the report by the Office of the State Comptroller acknowledges that the early days of vaccine distribution in late 2020 and early 2021 were chaotic and prone to mistakes, it found multiple violations of procurement rules by Essex officials who awarded multi-year “emergency” no-bid contracts — in several cases when health and safety were no longer at immediate risk.

“The government’s obligation to protect taxpayer funds doesn’t go away during an emergency,” acting State Comptroller Kevin Walsh said in a statement. "As we found in Essex County, overusing emergency contracts and failing to monitor vendors and implement basic financial controls increases the likelihood of fraud, waste, and abuse – risks that can and should be avoided.”

Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo Jr. said the report "is unbalanced, unfair" because it concentrates on a small amount of COVID money and does not accurately depict the county's response to the pandemic.

"We were not operating in a controlled vacuum as the comptroller would make you think," he said in a statement. "Decisions had to be made quickly, and we made them."

In a written response to a draft of the report, county officials said their continuous use of emergency procurement was not improper because “multi-year de-facto emergency contracts are legal and appropriate so long as the emergency is multi-year, which in the case of COVID-19 it clearly was.”

Missing invoices

Investigators found 15 different instances where invoices from vendors for services amounting to $871,000 were missing, making it difficult to validate what goods or services were provided. Among the missing invoices was one to an unnamed advertising firm for $264,000, the report states.

The report said that Essex officials paid one firm — Dunton Consulting of East Orange — $110,000 twice on the same invoice for the same services in a campaign to provide robocalls to county residents.

The mistake was caught by the comptroller's investigators and neither the county nor the firm "could provide any explanation for the oversight," the report says. An email sent to Dunton Consulting seeking comment was not immediately returned Tuesday.

Investigators also found "numerous irregularities" in keeping track of vendors' work hours. Vendors worked simultaneously for multiple contractors, including other public entities. For instance, the worker who was paid $130,000 from the vaccination program was also simultaneously logging hours with another public employer, the report said.

DiVincenzo said that there were "a few people" who had no-show jobs at the county vaccination sites but were fired immediately. He said Dunton Consulting had begun repaying the $110,000 to the county.

"I’m not saying that we were perfect," DiVincenzo said. "But when any wrongdoing was identified, we acted swiftly."

The report recommended the county hire an independent auditor to go over vaccine program expenditures and implement human resources changes that would cut down on fraud.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ COVID vaccine rollout in Essex County had lots of 'waste'