Report 2019-302 Recommendation 1 Responses

Report 2019-302: Judicial Council of California (Release Date: December 2019)

Recommendation #1 To: Judicial Council of California

To ensure that it complies with state law, maintains appropriate transparency, and provides the Legislature with all legally required information regarding its contracting and procurements, the Judicial Council should by February 2020 develop and implement a method to include all of the non-Superior Court entities' information required by the judicial contract law when submitting semiannual reports. For instance, if the publicly available FI$Cal website does not provide all the required information, the Judicial Council should implement an alternate reporting mechanism, such as providing summary information from FI$Cal data not available to the public.

1-Year Agency Response

Our 60-day and six-month updates on this recommendation described our efforts to improve the Judicial Council's reporting practices, including our collaborative efforts with the Department of FI$Cal. Following our last update in June 2020, the Legislature passed AB 3364 (chapter 36, statutes of 2020) in August which altered the Judicial Council's reporting responsibilities under section 19209 of the Public Contract Code. This change in the law thus affected how the Judicial Council sought to implement this recommendation.

Effective January 2021, judicial branch entities using FI$Cal—such as the Judicial Council, Supreme Court, and others—no longer must submit semi-annual reports detailing their activities to the Legislature or the State Auditor's Office. Instead, the statute requires the Judicial Council (and others using FI$Cal) to record their transactions within the FI$Cal system. This statutory change recognizes the important role of the State's public transparency websites and their utilization of FI$Cal for making contract and payment details available to the public. The specificity of the Judicial Council's contract and payment reporting now mirrors the transparency requirements placed on other state entities using FI$Cal.

The Legislature's recent statutory change is a significant improvement over the previous semi-annual reporting approach. Currently, section 19209 allows for the continual reporting and updating of our contracting and payment activity on a rolling basis, while also curing the timing delays in the now-abolished semi-annual reports that was a central issue in the auditor's report. Should the Department of FI$Cal or the State's transparency websites require that we record our transactions differently for transparency purposes, the Judicial Council will of course follow those state directives.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Resolved

Because of the change in state reporting requirements, we have assessed this recommendation as resolved.

6-Month Agency Response

After consulting with the Department of FI$Cal, the Judicial Council identified a report that now allows it to better comply with statutory reporting requirements. For the full six-month-period ending December 31, 2019, judicial branch entities made over $635 million in payments. This payment detail can be reviewed in a searchable format (via Microsoft Excel) on our public website at www.courts.ca.gov. However, we have more work remaining to improve our semi-annual reporting. Specifically, our "payment report" for non-trial court entities does not provide payment detail by judicial branch entity as required by the Public Contract Code. Instead, these payments in FI$Cal are generally coded under organization code "0250," which encompasses the entire judicial branch. We are exploring whether we can use FI$Cal's chartfields to better attribute payments from specific judicial branch entities (such as the Supreme Court, Courts of Appeal, and the Judicial Council) to their respective vendors in the payment report.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Partially Implemented

60-Day Agency Response

The Judicial Council expects to be in full compliance with this recommendation by the time the next semi-annual report is submitted in August 2020. In the meantime, the Judicial Council's staff have taken several steps to begin taking corrective action. Specifically, the following activities have occurred:

- Identified a report within FI$Cal that meets the statutory reporting requirements for procurement-related payment data. This new report was used as part of the semi-annual report that was submitted on February 1, 2020 (covering the six-month period between July and December 2019).

- Submitted two "change requests" to the Department of FI$Cal to create ways in which the necessary data can be extracted to comply with Legislative requirements for contract reporting. As an interim solution, the Judicial Council began efforts to manually capture required contract data in an existing workload spreadsheet. The interim solution was implemented on February 1, 2020 and will rely on this process for the next semi-annual report, which will be due on August 1st, 2020. The goal is to create an automated process using FI$Cal that will satisfy all reporting requirements.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Partially Implemented

All Recommendations in 2019-302

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.