I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
More than $3 million worth of items have been lost or stolen at the Indian Health Service from October 2007 through January of this year, including a valuable telephone switch at the agency’s Albuquerque satellite office, according to a federal report.
Roughly 1,400 items agency-wide fell into the categories of lost or stolen during that 16-month period, including the telephone switch valued at $25,500, a report by the Government Accountability Office shows.
The telephone switch missing from the Albuquerque office is among items GAO compiled into a list labeled “more egregious examples of lost or stolen property.”
Other items that made it onto that list were a laboratory analyzer at a Navajo health care facility valued at $37,000; and a defibrillator valued at $7,000 and more than $13,000 in desktop and laptop computers missing from a Tucson, Ariz. location.
The Indian Health Service provided medical services to approximately 1.9 million American Indians and Alaska Natives from more than 562 tribes in 2008, the report said.
In a response to the critical report, the Indian Health Service said that it was confident that most, “if not all, inventory currently unaccounted for will be identified as a result of” a new and more accurate property management information system the agency is implementing.
The agency also said that some items “temporarily missing” were perhaps out in the field with employees when the auditors from the GAO visited to conduct surveys.
The report’s authors, however, were severely critical of the Indian Health Service’s current property management system, noting that about two months after conducting its 2008 inventory, the agency was still looking for about $14.5 million in missing items.
Among the items still missing after the inventory last year were a “2002 ultrasound unit valued at $170,000, a 2003 X-ray mammography machine valued at $100,795, and a 2004 medication dispensing system valued at $168,285,” according to the report.
The report comes on the heels of a report issued by the agency a year ago that “revealed gross mismanagement of property and waste at IHS, including the loss or theft of 5,000 computers and other property worth $15.8 million.”
This month’s report was presented to several members of Congress as a follow-up audit to last year’s report to measure Indian Health Service’s “progress in improving its property management,” the report said.
