After at least a year of hearing about it, the long-awaited audit of the V.I. Legislature has finally started, with local and federal investigators making their entrance this week to begin the six-month-long process of compiling documents and conducting interviews.
The scope of the audit focuses on how the Legislature’s financial and administrative systems have run over the past six years, from the 26th to the 28th Legislatures, through the tenures of Senate presidents Lorraine Berry, Usie Richards, Adlah "Foncie" Donastorg and Louis P. Hill.
And the buzz around the Senate is that everything is fair game: auditors will get a chance to look and ask about everything from travel receipts to how they’re processed, and can talk to the central staffers without their supervisors present.
V.I. Inspector General Steven van Beverhoudt said Thursday that the spirit has so far been cooperative.
"We have been told that all the documents we need should be available for us," he said.
A comprehensive audit of the Legislature has long been a pipe dream for van Beverhoudt and his federal counterpart on St. Thomas, Hannibal Ware, who started thinking about the project after completing the audit of the Schneider Regional Medical Center.
At the time, the need for additional resources pushed back the launch date, but since then, both Donastorg and Hill have said getting an audit completed was a top priority.
"Now everything has fallen into place," van Beverhoudt said Thursday, adding that resources, such as manpower, have become available and allowed the audit—a joint effort between the V.I. Inspector General’s Office and the Inspector General’s Office under the U.S. Interior Department—to start.
Over the next six months, four auditors (three from Interior’s local field office and one from van Beverhoudt’s camp) will work at the Capitol Building on St. Thomas, conducting their analyses alongside the Legislature’s executive and business directors.
After a draft audit is produced and responses are made to the findings, a final draft should be released in about a year, officials said Thursday.