The District of Columbia paid a total of $72.4 million as a result of settlements and judgements over the course of a recent 18-month period, according to a report from the Office of the DC Auditor.
The report revealed that DC lacks an effective system to record, monitor, report, and mitigate risks, which causes it to fail in tracking and reducing the amount of settlements and judgments it pays for harm, or alleged harm, to people or property, such as a slip and fall on a sidewalk, a car damaged by a DC government vehicle, or harm to inmates.
“Without proper controls on standardized data collection and analyzing areas of high risk so they can be mitigated, we continue to put our government, residents, and others in harm’s way,” said DC Auditor Kathy Patterson. “We hope this report’s findings and recommendations will help support agency efforts underway to control risk and secure the system we need to improve our settlements and judgments processes.”
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) spent over $14.9 million in settlements and judgements from October 2017 through March 2019, according to the report. The amount makes up around two percent of the department’s total budget for the same time period.
DC Public Schools (DCPS) paid $13.4 million in settlements and judgements, which is approximately one percent of its budget during the same period, and the amount paid by the DC Department of Transportation (DDOT) was $4.5 million, nearly three percent of its budget.
The mechanisms used by the DC government to record the data on payment of settlements and judgments had gaps, which made it almost impossible to obtain a comprehensive view of risks, causes, and impacts, according to Patterson.
She added that “such a comprehensive view would allow the District to identify what may cause harm to residents, personnel, and visitors, and what could have been addressed by management before it was resolved with taxpayer dollars in the form of settlements and judgments.”
Another finding of the report was that some major settlements and judgments were paid from different sources than agency budgets and the Fund, because the total amount of settlements and judgments exceeded the total amount of funds allocated to the Settlements and Judgments Fund. The practice made it difficult to identify those payments within the District’s System of Accounting and Reporting (SOAR).