2012-041 - Table 2

1. To ensure the reliability of the ConApp database fields related to the number of students enrolled at the school level, the number of those enrolled students who are eligible to receive free meals, and the number of those students who are eligible to receive reduced-price meals, Education should establish an internal control process such as a systematic review of a sample of the local educational agencies’ and direct-funded charter schools’ supporting documentation.

1. Work through the regulatory process to develop stronger regulations governing paid leaves of absence for management personnel. The university should also maintain appropriate documentation supporting any leaves of absence it grants.

**3. Continue to work with California Faculty Association representatives during the collective bargaining process to strengthen its dual-employment policy by imposing disclosure and approval requirements for faculty; and impose similar requirements for other employees.

4. Create a centralized information system structure to catalog university compensation, and use the data to monitor campuses' implementation of systemwide policies and to measure the impact of these policies on university finances.

1. Issue systemwide guidance that directs campuses to develop hiring policies that establish consistency among searches and ensures that searches are conducted in a fair and equitable manner.

2. Issue systemwide guidance that encourages campuses to identify alternatives to broaden the perspectives of search committees and to ensure that women and minorities have equal opportunity to serve on search committees.

3. Issue systemwide guidance that instructs campuses to compare the proportions of women and minorities in the total applicant pool with the proportions in the labor pool to help assess their outreach efforts.

4. Issue systemwide guidance that advises campuses to compare and report the gender and ethnicity of their current workforce, and directs campuses to have search committees review affirmative action plans.

5. Issue systemwide guidance that devises and implements a uniform method for campuses to use when calculating availability of data.

6. Develop policies regarding the diversity of the trustees committee and the advisory committee and consider alternatives on the manner in which to increase committee diversity.

1. Reevaluate bookstores’ pricing policies to ensure that markups are not higher than necessary.

2. Direct bookstores to publicly disclose on an annual basis any amounts they use for purposes that do not relate to bookstore operations.

1. The university should revise its travel policy to establish defined maximum limits for reimbursing the costs of lodging and to establish controls that allow for exceptions to such limits only under specific circumstances.

1. To address the variations in per student funding of its campuses, the university should complete its reexamination of the base budgets to the campuses and implement appropriate changes to its budget process. As part of its reexamination of the base budget, it should:
• Identify the amount of general funds and tuition budget revenues that each campus receives for specific types of students (such as undergraduate, graduate, and health sciences) and explain any differences in the amount provided per student among the campuses.
• Consider factors such as specific research and public service programs at each campus, the higher level of funding provided to health sciences students, historical funding methods that favored graduate students, historical and anticipated future variations in enrollment growth funding, and any other factors applied consistently across campuses.
• After accounting for the factors mentioned above, address any remaining variations in campus funding over a specified period of time.
• Make the results of its reexamination and any related implementation plan available to stakeholders, including the general public.

2. To help improve accountability in the university’s budget process, and to help minimize the risk of unfair damage to its reputation, the university should take additional steps to increase the transparency of its budget process. Specifically, the Office of the President should update its budget manual to reflect current practices and make its revised budget manual, including relevant formulas and other methodologies for determining budget amounts, available on its Web site.

**4. To increase the transparency of university funds, the Office of the President should make available annually financial information regarding its funds, including beginning and ending balances; revenues, expenses, and transfers; and the impact of these transactions on the balances from year to year.

5. To ensure that the campus financial information published by the Office of the President can be better evaluated by interested stakeholders, the university should disclose instances in which campuses subsidize auxiliary enterprises with revenues from other funding sources and should disclose the sources of that funding.

6. To improve the transparency of its expenses, the university should identify more specific categories for expenses that are recorded under the Miscellaneous Services accounting code and should implement object codes that account for these expenses in more detail.

7. To ensure that campuses do not inappropriately use revenues generated from student fees imposed by referenda, the university should ensure that it, the regents, and the campuses do not expand the uses for such revenues beyond those stated in the referenda.

1. Work with the Department of Public Health and county agencies to gain access to the most accurate and complete statistics on abandoned babies.

1. Develop and maintain adequate documentation related to data storage, retrieval, and maintenance.

2. Evaluate the branch’s current fee structure using analyses that consider fiscal and workload factors.

3. Develop a staffing plan for the branch based on current, reliable data. The plan should reevaluate the branch’s assumptions about workload factors, assess backlogged work, and assess all currently required work and the human resources necessary to accomplish it.

4. Establish and communicate a timeline describing when the report required by Section 115000.1 of the Health and Safety Code will be available. The department should also discuss with appropriate members of the Legislature the specific information required by state law that it cannot provide.

5. Begin complying with the Executive Order D-62-02 and develop dose-based decommissioning standards formally or ask the governor to rescind this 2002 executive order.

6. Develop an updated low-level waste disposal plan.

1. Perform its mandated oversight responsibilities, including inspecting licensed laboratories every two years, sanctioning laboratories, and handling complaints.

2. Adopt and implement proficiency-testing policies and procedures regarding the review and notification of proficiency-testing results, timelines for responding to laboratories, monitoring of out-of-state laboratories, and verification of laboratories' enrollment and receipt of proficiency-testing scores.

3. Update its regulations, including requirements such as time frames on the laboratory community.

4. Continue its efforts to license California laboratories and take steps to license out-of-state laboratories that use specimens originating in California, as the law requires.

5. Identify necessary controls and incorporate them into its complaints policies. Develop and implement corresponding procedures for each control, and establish procedures to ensure that it promptly forwards complaints.

6. Maximize opportunities to impose sanctions, justify and document money penalties, ensure the collection of penalties, ensure corrective action is taken, and ensure that it notifies appropriate agencies.

7. Ensure that Laboratory Services has sufficient resources to meet its oversight responsibilities.

8. Work with appropriate parties to ensure that its data systems supports its needs. Develop and implement appropriate controls if Laboratory Services continues to use its internally developed databases.

9. Leverage existing processes and procedures, including developing a process to share state concerns identified during federal inspections.

1. To comply with requirements in the State Administrative Manual, Health Care Services should refrain from funding permanent full-time employees with the State’s funding mechanism for temporary-help positions.

2. To readily identify active IT and other contracts, Health Care Services should either revise its existing contract database or develop and implement a new contract database.

1. Public Health should demonstrate its compliance with General Services’ policies and procedures. Specifically, in its requests for offer, it should provide potential suppliers with the criteria and points that it will use to evaluate their offers.

1. Mental Health should implement the Legislative Analyst’s suggestion of hiring an independent consultant to evaluate the current staffing model for Mental Health’s hospitals. The staffing levels at Mental Health should then be adjusted, depending on the outcome of the consultant’s evaluation.

1. To ensure that all counties consistently gauge the cost-effectiveness of their early fraud activities and ongoing investigation efforts for the CalWORKs and food stamp programs, Social Services should work with the counties to develop a formula to regularly perform a cost-effectiveness analysis using information that the counties currently submit.

2. To make certain that counties receive the greatest benefit from the resources they spend on antifraud efforts related to CalWORKs and food stamp cases, Social Services should, using the results from the recommended cost-effectiveness analysis, determine why some counties’ efforts to combat welfare fraud are more cost-effective than others.

3. Social Services should seek to replicate the most cost-effective practices among all counties.

4. Social Services should continue to address the recommendations of the steering committee and promptly act on the remaining recommendations.

5. To ensure the accuracy and consistency of the information on welfare fraud activities that counties report and that Social Services subsequently reports to the federal government, the Legislature, and internal users, Social Services should remind counties that they are responsible for reviewing the accuracy and consistency of investigation activity reports before submission.

**7. Social Services should continue with regular meetings of its workgroup to further its efforts to clarify its instructions for completing the counties’ investigation activity reports.

8. To ensure that counties are consistently following up on all match lists, Social Services should remind counties of their responsibility under state regulations to follow up diligently on all match lists. Further, it should work with counties to determine why poor follow up exists and address those reasons.

9. Social Services should revive its efforts to work with counties and federal agencies to address the counties’ concerns about match list formats and criteria.

10. Social Services should track how counties determine prosecution thresholds for welfare fraud cases and determine the effects of these thresholds on counties’ decisions to investigate potential fraud, with a focus on determining best practices and cost-effective methods. It should then work with counties to implement the consistent use of these cost-effective methods.

11. Social Services should either ensure that counties follow state regulations regarding the use of administrative disqualification hearings or pursue changing the regulations.

1. To ensure that Medi-Cal recipients receive timely access to prescribed drugs, Health Care Services should abolish its policy of responding to drug TARs by the end of the next business day and should instead ensure that prior-authorization requests to dispense drugs are processed within the legally mandated 24-hour period. Alternatively, it should seek formal authorization from CMS to deviate from the 24-hour requirement, and should seek a similar modification to state law. In addition, Health Care Services should begin recording the actual time it receives paper TARs so that it can begin to measure accurately its processing times.

2. To ensure that Medi-Cal recipients are receiving timely medical services from providers, Health Care Services should start tracking prior-authorization medical TARs separately and should ensure that such TARs are processed within an average of five working days. Although state law and regulations specifically require prior authorization for certain medical services, Health Care Services generally does not require prior authorizations in practice. Consequently, Health Care Services should seek legislation to update existing laws and amend its regulations to render them consistent with its TAR practices.

1. To ensure that citation review conferences are completed expeditiously, Public Health should continue to take steps to eliminate its backlog of appeals awaiting a citation review conference.

2. To increase revenue for the penalty accounts, Public Health should seek legislation authorizing it to revise periodically the penalty amounts to reflect an inflation indicator, such as the CPI.

3. To increase revenue for the penalty accounts, Public Health should ensure that it conducts all state surveys of facilities every two years, as required by state law.

4. To ensure that it complies with current state law and increases transparency, Public Health should adopt regulations for the administration of temporary management companies.

5 To increase revenue for the state account, Public Health should seek legislation authorizing it to require facilities that want to contest the monetary penalty to pay the penalty upon its appeal, which could then be deposited into an account within the special deposit fund. The original monetary penalty deposited, plus interest accrued in the account, should then be liquidated in accordance with the terms of the decision.

6. To ensure consistency with federal guidance related to federal requirements, and that it is not creating incentives for facilities to appeal citations issued for noncompliance with state requirements, Public Health should provide guidance to its staff that discourages settling appealed monetary penalties for a better term than had the facility not contested the citation and paid the penalty within the time frame specified in law to receive a 35 percent reduction. If Public Health believes instances occur when it is appropriate to reduce a monetary penalty by more than 35 percent, it should document which statutory or regulatory factors that formed the basis for concluding that the original class of citation and corresponding monetary penalty amount were no longer considered valid or relevant.

7. To increase revenue for the penalty accounts, Public Health should seek legislation specifying a time frame within which facilities with nonappealed citations that do not qualify for a 35 percent reduction must pay their monetary penalties and allowing Public Health to collect interest on late payments of monetary penalties.

1. To the extent that Public Health continues to fund its various contracts, it should establish clearer expectations with its contractors concerning how much money is to be spent directly on the different aspects of the EWC program and should monitor spending to confirm that these expectations are being met.

2. To ensure better public transparency and accountability for how the EWC program is administered, Public Health should comply with state law to develop regulations, based on input from the public and interested parties, that will direct how Public Health administers the EWC program. At a minimum, such regulations should define the eligibility criteria for women seeking access to EWC screening services.

1. To ensure that consumers receive high-quality, cost-effective services that meet the goals of their individual program plans (IPPs) consistent with state law, Developmental Services should require the regional centers to document the basis of any IPP-related vendor selection and specify which comparable vendors (when available) were evaluated.

2. Developmental Services should review a representative sample of this documentation as part of its biennial waiver reviews or fiscal audits to ensure that regional centers are complying with state law—and particularly with the July 2009 amendment requiring selection of the least costly available provider of comparable service.

1. To eliminate duplicative effort and increase efficiency, Corrections should not make unnecessary referrals to Mental Health. Corrections and Mental Health should jointly revise the structured screening instrument so that the referral process adheres more closely to the law’s intent.

2. To reduce costs for unnecessary evaluations, Mental Health should either issue a regulation or seek a statutory amendment to clarify that when resolving a difference of opinion between the two initial evaluators of an offender, Mental Health must seek the opinion of a fourth evaluator only when a third evaluator concludes that the offender meets SVP criteria.

**4. To ensure that the Legislature can provide effective oversight of the program, Mental Health should complete and submit as soon as possible its reports to the Legislature about Mental Health’s efforts to hire state employees to conduct evaluations and about the impact of Jessica’s Law on the program.

1. To ensure that the insurance fund makes the most efficient use of the State’s limited resources, Social Services should use these claims and expenditure data to determine the annual appropriation amount needed for the insurance fund to meet its anticipated liabilities.

2. To ensure that the insurance fund makes the most efficient use of the State’s limited resources, Social Services should establish a written policy or procedures to guide staff on the appropriate methodology to use when calculating these anticipated liabilities.

3. To ensure that the insurance fund makes the most efficient use of the State’s limited resources, Social Services should establish an adequate reserve amount for the insurance fund and reevaluate it annually.

1. To ensure that its licensees, including state-licensed foster homes, foster family agencies, and group homes, are in compliance with applicable requirements and that children are protected, Social Services should complete on-site reviews at least once every five years as required by state law.

2. To encourage more effective communication from county CWS agencies regarding its licensees, Social Services should specify in regulations what types of situations or allegations the agencies should forward to its licensing division.

3. To ensure that rates paid to foster family agencies are appropriate, Social Services should analyze the rates and provide reasonable support for each component, especially the 40 percent administrative fee it currently pays these agencies.

4. Social Services should create and monitor compliance with clear requirements specifying that children placed with foster family agencies must have elevated treatment needs that would require a group home placement if not for the existence of these agencies’ programs. Specifically, Social Services should revise its regulations so licensed foster homes have higher priority than foster family agencies for children that do not have identified treatment needs.

5. Social Services should require county CWS agencies to file in CWS/CMS a detailed justification for any child placed with a foster family agency.

6. Social Services should create a mechanism by which it can efficiently check for compliance with the needs-justification requirement.

7. To encourage continued progress and innovation in keeping children safe, Social Services should add to its current CWS performance metrics a measure of the percentage of investigatory visits (both immediate and 10-day) completed on time that excludes attempted investigatory visits from its calculation of successful outcomes.

8. To determine whether the hold harmless provision has been effective in reducing caseloads and whether it should be revised or rescinded, Social Services should refine and use CWS/CMS to calculate and report county CWS caseloads.

9. To encourage county CWS agencies to conduct formal internal death reviews, Social Services should revise its annual report on child deaths resulting from abuse or neglect to provide information on whether county CWS agencies conducted such a review of child deaths with prior CWS history. To obtain this information, Social Services should revise its regulations to require all county CWS agencies to not only report child deaths resulting from abuse or neglect but to also require a subsequent report indicating whether an internal child death review was completed.

10. As part of its instructions related to its outcome review process, Social Services should direct county CWS agencies to include completed internal death reviews in the development of their self-assessments and improvement plans.

11. To provide more useful information in its annual report, Social Services should provide child death information broken out by county, not just statewide totals. Further, Social Services should provide more analysis, such as comparing child death information over multiple years and presenting each county’s child deaths as a percentage of its total child population.

1. Corrections should ensure that its new data system will address its current lack of data available for statewide analysis, specifically data related to identifying the custody staffing cost by inmate characteristics such as security level, age, and custody designation. If implementation of its new system continues to be delayed, or if Corrections determines that the new system will not effectively replace the current assignment and scheduling systems used by the institutions, it should improve its existing data related to custody staffing levels and use the data to identify the related costs of various inmate populations.

2. Corrections should communicate to the Department of Personnel Administration^—which is responsible for negotiating labor agreements with employee bargaining units—the cost of allowing any type of leave to be counted as time worked for the purpose of computing overtime compensation.

3. Corrections should encourage the Department of Personnel Administration to not agree to provisions in bargaining unit agreements that permit any type of leave to be counted as time worked for the purpose of computing overtime compensation.

4. Corrections should encourage the Department of Personnel Administration to negotiate a reduction in the amount of voluntary overtime a correctional officer is allowed to work in future collective bargaining unit agreements, in order to reduce the likelihood that involuntary overtime will cause them to work more than 80 hours of overtime in total during a month.

5. Corrections should better ensure that it prevents the instances in which correctional officers work beyond the voluntary overtime limit in a pay period.

**7.Corrections should track, maintain, and use historical program assignment and waiting list data by inmate.

1. To minimize costs through the use of telemedicine, Prison Health Care Services should review the effectiveness of telemedicine consultations to better understand how to use telemedicine.

2. Prison Health Care Services should perform a more comprehensive comparison between the cost of using telemedicine and the cost of traditional consultations, beyond the guarding and transportation costs, so that it can make informed decisions regarding the cost-effectiveness of using telemedicine.

3. To increase the use of the telemedicine system, Prison Health Care Services should continue to implement the recommendations that it has adopted from the consultant’s review of telemedicine capabilities.

1. Corrections should complete its cleanup of data that will be transferred into the new system in its data system.

2. Corrections should create a schedule for regular checks of the accuracy of existing sentencing information in its data system.

**4. To better communicate to policy makers the annual cost of incarceration, and to provide a more accurate estimate of expenditures associated with changes in the large leave balances of custody staff, Corrections should provide the relevant legislative policy and fiscal committees a calculation of the annual increase or decrease in its liability for the leave balances of custody staff.

5. Corrections should provide the relevant legislative policy and fiscal committees an estimate of the annual cost of leave balances likely to be paid for retiring custody staff.

1. To determine whether the additional expansion of telemedicine is cost-effective within the California correctional system, Prison Health Care Services should identify and collect the data it needs to estimate the savings of additional telemedicine through an analysis of the cost of specialty care visits currently provided outside of the institution that could be replaced with telemedicine.

2. To determine whether the additional expansion of telemedicine is cost-effective within the California correctional system, Prison Health Care Services should further analyze the cost-effectiveness of telemedicine through a more robust estimate of savings, including considering factors such as the percent of telemedicine consultations that required subsequent in-person visits because the issue could not be addressed through telemedicine.

3. To ensure that the total amount of overtime worked by custody staff does not unduly reduce their effectiveness and result in unsafe operations, Prison Health Care Services should monitor overtime closely. If its efforts to reduce the number of referrals of inmates to outside specialty services do not reduce the amount of overtime worked by custody staff for the purpose of medical guarding and transportation, Prison Health Care Services should explore other methods of reducing the total amount of overtime worked by custody staff.

1. Because an employee improperly reported overtime for responding to building alarm activations that never occurred, Corrections should take appropriate disciplinary actions against the employee and pursue collection efforts for the compensation she did not earn.

1. To improve the reliability of employment data contained in CalParole, Corrections should ensure that parole agents correctly follow procedures related to populating the data fields of and maintaining CalParole.

2. Supervisors of parole agents should conduct periodic reviews of parolee files to verify whether employment fields are completed appropriately and whether employment is documented adequately.

3. As Corrections prepares to move CalParole data into the Strategic Offender Management System (SOMS), it should modify existing employment-related fields and add to SOMS new fields that are currently not available in CalParole so that Corrections can minimize the opportunity for erroneous data entries and make employment data more reliable.

1. To ensure that it has a uniform set of inmate assignment standards, CALPIA should continue its efforts to issue regulations and complete the amendment of Corrections’ operations manual. It should then work with Corrections to implement the changes to the inmate assignment criteria and the assignment process when the regulations take effect.

2. CALPIA should maintain the source documentation used in calculating the savings it brings to the State as well as ensure that an adequate secondary review of its calculation occurs.

3. CALPIA should qualify its savings by stating that employment at CALPIA enterprises may be just one of several factors that contribute to the lower recidivism of its inmates.

1. To eliminate duplicative effort and increase efficiency, Corrections should not make unnecessary referrals to Mental Health. Corrections and Mental Health should jointly revise the structured screening instrument so that the referral process adheres more closely to the law’s intent.

2. To eliminate duplicative effort and increase efficiency, Corrections should not make unnecessary referrals to Mental Health. For example, Corrections should better leverage the time and work it already conducts by including in its referral process (1) determining whether the offender committed a predatory offense, (2) reviewing results from any previous screenings and evaluations that Mental Health completed and considering whether the most recent parole violation or offense might alter the previous decision, and (3) using STATIC-99R to assess the risk that an offender will reoffend.

1. To ensure that the chief psychologist and other Corrections' employees do not misuse state resources, Corrections should establish a system for monitoring whether psychology staff at the correctional facility, including the chief psychologist, are working during specified hours of duty.

1. To ensure that the State does not spend additional resources on COMPAS while its usefulness is uncertain, Corrections should suspend its use of the COMPAS core and reentry assessments until it has issued regulations and updated its operations manual to define how Corrections’ use of COMPAS will affect decision making regarding inmates, such as clarifying how COMPAS results will be considered when sending inmates to different prison facilities, enrolling them in rehabilitative programs to address their criminal risk factors, and developing expectations for those on parole.

2. To ensure that the State does not spend additional resources on COMPAS while its usefulness is uncertain, Corrections should suspend its use of the COMPAS core and reentry assessments until it has demonstrated to the Legislature that it has a plan to measure and report COMPAS’s effect on reducing recidivism. Such a plan could consider whether inmates enrolled in a rehabilitative program based on a COMPAS assessment had lower recidivism rates than those provided rehabilitative programming as a result of non-COMPAS factors.

3. Once Corrections resumes its use of COMPAS core and reentry assessments, it should provide ongoing training to classification staff representatives, parole agents, and others that may administer or interpret COMPAS assessment results to ensure that COMPAS is a valuable inmate assessment and planning tool.

4. Once Corrections resumes its use of COMPAS core and reentry assessments, it should develop practices or procedures to periodically determine whether its staff are using COMPAS core or reentry assessments as intended. Such a process might include performing periodic site visits to corroborate that COMPAS is being used as required.

5. Once Corrections resumes its use of COMPAS core and reentry assessments, it should develop practices or procedures to periodically compare the demand for certain rehabilitative programs, as suggested by a COMPAS core assessment, to the existing capacity to treat such needs.

1. To ensure that data maintained in CAPES are accurate and complete, HCD should complete its review of the accuracy of the data transferred to CAPES.

2. HCD should ensure that its cleanup efforts are thoroughly documented and retained for future reference.

1. To ensure that it consistently adheres to requirements in state law when licensing pilots, the board should establish and implement a procedure for approving and monitoring board-appointed physicians.

2. To ensure that its expenditures are appropriate, the board should competitively bid contracts with physicians who perform physical examinations of pilots.

1. To ensure that it can respond adequately to funding levels that may vary from its business plan, the Authority should develop and publish alternative funding scenarios that reflect the possibility of reduced or delayed funding from the planned sources. These scenarios should detail the implications of variations in the level or timing of funding on the program and its schedule.

**3. To avert possible legal challenges, the Authority should ensure that the review group adheres to the Meeting Act or seek a formal opinion from the Office of the Attorney General regarding whether the review group is subject to this act.

1. To improve accountability internally and with the public, Caltrans should create and incorporate an analysis of support cost budget variances in its quarterly report to the agency and in its annual report to the Legislature and the governor. The analysis should report on the number of completed projects with budget variances and on the number of open projects for which the estimates at completion predict budget variances. Further, the analysis should report on the overrun and underrun ratios for those projects, and the portions of the variances due to rates and hours. Also, Caltrans should include in its strategic plan a measurable goal for reducing variances.

**4. To improve performance metrics related to the support program, Caltrans should continue to explore the use of additional metrics, such as a measure based on a productivity index as described in a March 2011 draft study by the University of California, Davis.

5. To ensure that it monitors the status of projects, Caltrans should implement earned value management throughout its districts in a manner similar to the implementation in the Los Angeles district. To allow for performance evaluation of project work, Caltrans should ensure that these performance metrics are available at the task level for both active and completed projects. Caltrans should instruct districts to aggregate this information for all projects by task level, to better assess the effectiveness and efficiency of support costs by task level. Caltrans should also make available to project managers graphical displays of project cost and schedule performance.

6. To better address costs associated with the support program, Caltrans should ensure that the PRSM system contains strong controls that ensure employees only charge time to projects and phases for which they are assigned.

7. To better address costs associated with the support program, Caltrans should commission an independent study of the costs and benefits of using consultants to address temporary increases in workload and, if the study reveals cost savings, use consultants. To the extent possible, Caltrans should also use temporary staff appointments for temporary increases in workload when consultants are unavailable.

**2. To improve management of its fraud investigations, the department should formalize the approach used to analyze recycling data for potential fraud and develop criteria for staff to use when deciding whether to refer anomalies for investigation. Because DORIIS will be a central data source for recycling activities once it is implemented, the department should continue with its plan to automate the review of recycling data within DORIIS to identify potential fraud.

3. To improve oversight of grants and ensure that the intended value is received from the grant funds it awards, the department should for recipients of market development grants that are unable to meet the goals of their grants, maintain contact with grantees after the project is completed to determine if the goals may ultimately be achieved.

4. The department should weave benchmarks, coupled with metrics to measure the quality of its activities, into the strategic plan for the beverage program to allow it to better measure progress in meeting goals.

5. The department should ensure that the strategic plan incorporates all relevant activities of the beverage program.

1. To provide the public with accurate and complete information on the bond-funded projects it administers, Water Resources should develop and consistently use a formalized, documented review process that will provide greater assurance that project information posted to the Bond Accountability Web site is regularly updated and contains accurate information.

1. To recover the cost of the improper use of the state vehicle, Fish and Game should follow the guidelines established in state regulations and initiate repayment from the manager for the costs associated with the misuse of the state vehicle.

2. To recover the cost of the improper travel reimbursements, Fish and Game should seek recovery of the $595 in lodging and meal reimbursements that were paid to the employee.

3. Fish and Game should provide training to the manager and the employee about state rules for the payment of employee travel expenses.

1. When the commission determines that it will pursue delinquent lessees itself, it should use a collection agency or a program such as the Franchise Tax Board’s Interagency Intercept Collections Program.

2. To ensure that it receives rent from the lessee that reflects the approximate value for the State’s property at those times when a lessee disputes a modification to the rental amount after the commission exercises its right to perform a rent review or because the lease expired, the commission should include in its lease agreements a provision that requires lessees to pay the commission’s proposed increased rental amount, which would be deposited into an account within the Special Deposit Fund. The increased rental amounts deposited, plus the corresponding interest accrued in the account, should then be liquidated in accordance with the amount agreed to in the final lease agreement.

3. To ensure that it does not undervalue certain types of leases, the commission should amend its regulations for establishing pipeline rents on state land as staff recommended in the 2010 survey of methods used by agencies in other states to establish pipeline rents.

4. To ensure that it does not undervalue certain types of leases, the commission should implement and follow its plan to regularly update its benchmarks for determining rental amounts.

5. The commission should establish a monitoring program to ensure that the funds generated from granted lands are expended in accordance with the public trust.

6. To ensure that all of its oil and gas leases have current surety bonds and liability insurance, as required by law and certain lease agreements, the commission should require lessees to provide documentation of their surety bonds and liability insurance. If the commission believes that assessing a monetary penalty will be effective in encouraging lessees to obtain surety bonds or liability insurance, it should seek legislation to provide this authority. Finally, if it obtains this authority, the commission should enforce it.

1. Consider refunding physicians’ license fees or consider temporarily reducing them to ensure that its fund balance does not continue to significantly exceed the level established in law.

1. The board should address the structural and operational flaws that prevent identification of erroneous information and implement edit checks and other system controls sufficient to identify errors.

2. To ensure that the board appropriately carries out its outreach efforts, it should define the specific procedures to accomplish its action strategies for outreach and establish quantitative measures to evaluate the effectiveness of its outreach efforts.

1. To ensure that it determines savings to the State going forward for strategically sourced contracts, General Services should examine the State’s recent purchasing patterns when determining whether to rebid or extend previously strategically sourced contracts and when estimating expected savings. It should subsequently compare the savings it achieves to the expected savings for those contracts.

1. To further enhance its corrective action planning process as a means of improving the unemployment program, the department should establish several key performance targets or benchmarks that are tied to each specific corrective action, to effectively gauge the impact of the actions on its goal of achieving the acceptable levels related to the timeliness measures.

2. As part of an overall strategy to limit the number of calls it receives while still providing timely and effective customer service, the department should use existing data and additional data from the new phone system to gain a better understanding of why people request to speak to an agent. Using this information, the department should further develop strategies and measurable goals related to achieving a reduction in call volumes. For example, to ensure that virtually all calls are able to gain access to the voice response portion of its new phone system, the department should monitor the volume of blocked call attempts and work with its phone system vendor if necessary to increase the system’s capacity.

3. To evaluate the effectiveness of its other efforts to provide services to claimants in ways that do not require them to speak to agents, such as Web-Cert and Tele-Cert, the department should periodically summarize and assess the more robust management information available under its new phone system.

4. To better track and improve the timeliness of determinations for the training benefits program and to assist claimants in understanding self-arranged training requirements, the department should track and report the number of claimants it determines are both eligible and ineligible for the self-arranged training and the reasons for these determinations, to better focus some of its recommendations toward how it can assist claimants in understanding the program’s criteria.

5. To better track and improve the timeliness of determinations for the training benefits program and to assist claimants in understanding self-arranged training requirements, the department should track the number of claimants that it finds to be both ineligible for self-arranged training and ultimately ineligible for unemployment benefits and develop strategies to expedite the determination process for these claimants.

1. Develop and update a plan that identifies areas of noncompliance with federal ADA regulations and includes the appropriate steps for achieving full compliance. In addition, the Veterans Home should develop grievance procedures and identify a specific employee as its ADA coordinator.

1. To ensure that it resolves sufficiently its backlog of test claims, incorrect reduction claims, and the boilerplate amendment request, the Commission should work with Finance to seek additional resources to reduce its backlog, including test claims and incorrect reduction claims. In doing so, Commission staff should prioritize its workload and seek efficiencies to the extent possible.

1. Veterans Services should require the CVSOs to submit information on the number of claims filed for C&P benefits and information on their outreach activities.

2. As Veterans Services expands its efforts to increase veterans’ participation in C&P benefits, it should use veterans’ demographic information, such as that available through the U.S. Census Bureau, and the information it plans to obtain from the CVSOs using its SAIM system, to focus its outreach and coordination efforts on those counties with the highest potential for increasing the State’s rate of participation in C&P benefits.

3. Continue its efforts to pursue the SAIM system to enable it to monitor the quantity and quality of claims processed by the CVSOs, and ensure it meets legal requirements regarding auditing CVSO workload reports and verifying the appropriateness of college fee waivers. To the extent that Veterans Services is unsuccessful in implementing the SAIM system, the department will need to develop other avenues by which to meet its legal requirements.

4. Continue working with the Federal Housing Administration and the Ginnie Mae to lower its interest rates on loans.

1. To enhance the value of the Bond Accountability Web site, Finance should require administering agencies to provide information about the actual amounts of bond funds spent on posted projects at least semiannually.

2. To enhance the value of the Bond Accountability Web site, Finance should develop a tracking and review process to periodically assess the completeness of the project information posted to the Web site. Such a process should include a review of whether state agencies are describing, in terms the public can easily understand, the expected or realized benefits of bond-funded projects.

**2. To make certain that the Family Court Services (FCS) evaluators are qualified, the Sacramento family court should develop processes to ensure that it signs all FCS evaluator declarations of qualifications annually.

3. To make certain that the FCS evaluators are qualified, the Sacramento family court should ensure that its unlicensed FCS evaluators complete the licensing portion of the annual declarations of qualifications.

4. To make certain that the FCS evaluators are qualified, the Sacramento family court should identify the training each of the FCS evaluators need to satisfy the court rules’ requirements and ensure that they attend the trainings.

5. To make certain that the FCS evaluators are qualified, the Sacramento family court should develop processes to ensure that evaluator declarations of qualifications include all relevant information, such as the evaluator’s experience.

6. To make certain that the FCS evaluators are qualified, the Sacramento family court should take all reasonable steps to ensure its FCS evaluators meet the minimum qualifications and training requirements before assigning them to any future Family Code Section 3111 evaluations. If necessary, and as soon as reasonably possible, the court should require the FCS evaluators to take additional education or training courses to compensate for the minimum qualifications and training requirements that were not met.

7. To verify that its private mediator and evaluator panel members meet the minimum qualifications and training requirements before appointment, the Sacramento family court should obtain any missing applications and training records for private mediators and evaluators on its current panel list before appointing them to future cases.

8. To verify that its private mediator and evaluator panel members meet the minimum qualifications and training requirements before appointment, the Sacramento family court should reinstate its local rules for private mediators and evaluators to provide a minimum of three references, and for private evaluators to provide a statement that they have read the court’s evaluator guidelines.

9. To make sure that the minor’s counsel it appoints meet the additional standards required by the superior court’s local rules, the Sacramento family court should obtain any missing applications for minor’s counsel before appointing them to any future cases.

10. To strengthen its accounting process for California Family Code Section 3111 evaluations, the Sacramento Superior Court should update its accounting procedures related to billing FCS evaluation costs to include steps for verifying the mathematical accuracy of the FCS summary and the proper allocation of costs between the parties.

6. To better manage costs of future IT projects, the AOC should disclose full and accurate cost estimates to the Judicial Council, the Legislature, and stakeholders from the beginning of projects.

7. To better manage costs of future IT projects, the AOC should ensure that it has a long-term funding strategy in place before investing significant resources in a project.

8. Although the Judicial Council has the legal authority to compel the courts to adopt CCMS, to better foster superior court receptiveness to deploying CCMS, the AOC should continue to work with the superior courts that have deployed the civil system to ensure it is addressing their concerns in a timely and appropriate manner.

9. Although the Judicial Council has the legal authority to compel the courts to adopt CCMS, to better foster superior court receptiveness to deploying CCMS, the AOC should work with superior courts to address concerns about hosting data at the California Court Technology Center (Technology Center). Further, the AOC should take steps to ensure that superior courts do not lose productivity or efficiencies by hosting data at the Technology Center.

1. The assistance program should take steps to better gauge its effectiveness. For example, it could measure how long its participants remain in the program and assess the program’s impact on any further actions that disciplinary bodies impose on these attorneys. Further, if the assistance program believes that the effectiveness of the program is better measured through other means, it should develop these alternative measures and assess the program’s effectiveness in meeting its stated goals.