PRESS RELEASE
3/18/2009
The ND EMS Association would like to address an issue that has surfaced within our organization. We would like to disclose that we have identified areas within our accounting practices that have caused us to initiate an audit of the HRSA grant funds we have received.
In 2004 the ND EMS Association entered into a contract with the Department of Health Emergency Preparedness and Response as part of the national movement to increase preparedness of the United States and North Dakota. Emergency Response and Preparedness awarded contracts to multiple agencies including the ND EMS Association to perform specific tasks to prepare ND for a major event that would put stress on the healthcare industry. Each entity had specific goals to accomplish within the grants.
The intent of the initial grant for EMS was to study and develop a plan to respond to a major event concerning chemicals, biological, radioactive, nuclear, explosive events or CBRNE. Other goals were to develop a surge capacity plan to help hospitals transport up to 500 patients within ND. To accomplish this we developed a regional response plan for ND including strategic positioning of equipment and supplies, a disaster plan template for every ND Ambulance service, a state wide triage system, regional response teams that would assist all ambulance services and hospitals in a major event and developed haz-mat awareness, triage & incident command training as well as training for the regional response teams. Our plan has been very successful and now the entire state is moving in the direction of regional response and preparedness.
Our association has a volunteer board of directors that started the development of this plan. Within a few months we hired staff to assist with the organization and workload of the projects. We relied on volunteer committees and providers for input and to gather information so our staff could develop the working papers and reports for the grant. Our association sub-contracted some of the work to outside businesses as we did not have the time to complete all the tasks ourselves. We contracted for the initial study to be completed, two classes (haz-mat awareness for EMS and triage and ICS) to be developed and the training of our regional response team training.
In late 2008 our office staff identified a few areas that they felt did not follow the grant guidance. They found a few accounting issues that needed to be addressed. Our association held a special meeting to address the concerns. At that meeting a motion was made and passed that we would hire Eide Bailly to complete a review audit of all expenditures related to the HRSA grants and once completed we would turn the results over to EPR for their review and decision. The next day Eide Bailly was contacted and agreed to complete the audit for us. The audit was being worked on at the time of our next scheduled board of directors meeting and at the direction of legal counsel we decided to have Eide Bailly give us an unofficial report of their progress. Because the report was not a final report and it needed to be turned over to EPR for their review, a motion was made and passed to go into executive session to hear the report.
An overview of the results revealed there were requests for reimbursement that were accounted to the wrong cost centers and should not have been reimbursed by the grant. We were missing detailed receipts for many items that were purchased, could not provide meeting minutes for meeting expenses that were reimbursed and our staff could not provide time allocation documentation to differentiate when our staff was working on HRSA grant projects or other association business. We identified our mistakes, took the right steps and had an audit, turned the audit report over to EPR and are working with them to determine what will need to be reimbursed back to them. We have accomplished all of the goals of the grants, have produced a very solid plan for ND EMS and have been very involved with the states response to a major event.
We did not believe it was appropriate to release the audit until the EPR reconciliation was completed. Even though the EPR has not completed the reconciliation, we feel we need to offer the Eide Bailly report to the membership for their review. You can view the complete report on our web site www.ndemsa.org . We would like our membership to know we have made every decision in the best interest of ND EMS. We will be holding a meeting during our annual conference and trade show April 3rd at 7:00pm to address any questions.
ND EMS Association Board of Directors