HUNTSVILLE, Ala. ( WAFF ) - WAFF 48 News is on your side digging into how the state spends your money on everything from laptops to lawnmowers but can not seem to find them.

We dug into the State Auditor’s records to find thousands of items either lost or stolen that certainly add up.

Over the past five years, Alabama state agencies reported 1,876 items either lost, stolen or damaged, all bought with your money.

That’s more than $900,000 worth of property, with only a fraction ever found.

“It’s surprising that that much stuff just in one period you know would show up as missing, and that, especially, you know, something like a pistol,” said Alabama Taxpayer, Bill Cole.

Reported in 2022, you’ll find a 40 caliber semi-automatic pistol the state can’t find after a Warden change at the Department of Corrections.

In 2021, a Glock pistol was reported as “lost” after a Department of Revenue employee left their vehicle unlocked outside a store.

“Unlocked vehicles are a negligent loss of state property. If you leave your vehicle unlocked and an item is stolen out of it, my position as Auditor would be you need to repay the state for that.,” State Auditor, Andrew Sorrell said. “But even if you repay the state for the dollar value of the pistol that goes missing, what happened to the pistol? That’s the larger question.”

Sorrell is responsible for tracking state agency purchases of items more than $500.

A State officer’s body camera was reportedly left on top of his vehicle, to then be run over.

Multiple laptops and tablets were nowhere to be found from the Department of Agriculture in the 2024 second-quarter report.

A pricey Department of Transportation Crawler Compact Excavator was stolen right from the job site.

Even still, Sorrell said out of $1.3 billion worth of taxpayer property, the state of Alabama isn’t doing badly.

“Our losses are a fraction of 1 percent in a year. The last number I had was .16 percent lost in fiscal year 2023, which is a very, very small fraction. A lot of the time the losses are non-negligent. It was an accident. Somebody broke something, it got stolen,” Sorrell said. “You couldn’t control it but other times, there is clearly negligent loss of state property. We had a fellow unloading property at state surplus. And instead of, you know, helping unload it off the truck with somebody, he didn’t want to wait, he just took the property and threw it off the back of the truck, and he broke $20,000 worth of property.”

Sorrell said when possible he does pursue negligent losses through garnishing an employee’s wages or setting a repayment plan.

However, there is one glaring issue that Sorrell said needs to be fixed on the front end before anything turns up missing.

“No one is verifying that the purchases actually get put onto the property rolls in the first place. That’s the step that we’re missing, and that’s the step that I’m working to correct,” added Sorrell.

He wants lawmakers to pass a bill to require state agencies to report losses within 30 days and not two years later when the next audit rolls around.

The bill would also establish a Property Investigations Division with the auditor’s office to look into lost or stolen state property and allow the Auditor’s office to issue a demand letter to repay the state this money.

To view the Auditor’s records yourself, click here .


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