VIRGINIA — Extreme turnover, horrendous mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and overall disfunction, that’s the findings in a new report about the Virginia Department of Health, VDH.
The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, JLARC, conducted the study.
The report is 127 pages released in November 2024outlines major financial problems, mismanagement and staffing issues at VDH.
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VDH Chief Operating Officer Christopher Lindsay was brought in back in 2022 to help clean up the mess that started years ago and was made worse by COVID.
“We agreed with everything that came out of that study,” said Lindsay.
WTVR spoke to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin on November 12 about the findings.
“When we came in 2022, the Virginia Department of Health was very troubled and they were troubled in lots of ways,” said Youngkin, “one of them has been that they have not been able to put together the organizational structure to provide the kind of oversight necessary so we have been working on lots of things in the Department of Health and the study was encouraging and everything they listed we have already been doing.”
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One big issue at VDH was former employee Adam Harrell who pleaded guilty to embezzling four million dollars by directing public dollars to go towards a company he owned called Strategic Tech Innovations from January 2021 to March 2023.
Prosecutors say the Midlothian resident pleaded guilty to mail fraud, federal program theft and tax evasion in connection with a scheme to misappropriate millions of dollars.
They say he bought real estate, luxury vehicles, dozens of firearms, and jewelry with the stolen funds.
Exposure of this crime uncovered other problems like a 33 million dollar budget shortfall.
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Lindsay said, “Based on that experience, we decided to look across the organization, understand what other opportunities we have for improvement.”
The report found internal controls were not safeguarding public funds and that VDH struggled to pay vendors, other state agencies, and employees on time – and had problems accounting for and managing millions and millions of the agency’s state and federal funds.
Associate Director at JLARC Tracey Smith oversaw the report. She said, “The most concerning, I think to me, was the evidence that VDH has not been managing the federal funds that it receives to actually deliver the public health services around the Commonwealth.”
With five thousand employees at 35 different local health districts along with the office in Richmond –many financial decisions were previously made at the local level.
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“Once it became clear that not every office was doing that well, there has been an effort to centralize that,” said Smith.
Lindsay says many vacancies in financial and auditing positions proved detrimental to the operation.
“The right dollars were not put into making sure that those positions were appropriately filled. People continued to leave the organization and there was not the right emphasis, put on, making sure that those functions were appropriately stood up to support public health,” said Lindsay.
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Now there’s new efforts retain and hire good leadership and staff.
Lindsay said many of the recommendations made in the report have already been implemented.
“It's a sobering document to read and as a taxpayer and as a citizen I can understand why there would be a lot of people that are upset with this and I agree with that and so I just want to say that we're doing everything we can to make sure that we're correcting it and making sure that the public health function is secure in Virginia,” said Lindsay.
