Posted on 12/03/25
| News Source: FOX45
Annapolis, MD - Dec. 3, 2025 - As audits stack up this year revealing gaps in protocols, systems, and a lack of oversight in some state agencies, Gov. Wes Moore has a message to his agency heads: fix the problems.
Most recently, a state audit revealed 42 state offices spent a total of $8.5 billion last year with minimal oversight. That audit came on the heels of a State Highway Administration audit detailing $360 million in unauthorized spending for federal projects, and a separate Social Services Administration audit revealing a lack of protections for foster care children in Maryland.
In November, during a Joint Audit and Evaluation Committee briefing, auditors noted that 34% of audits had repeated findings appear in the next probe, as of June 2025; 10% were repeated in two or more audits.
“For perspective, OLA (Office of Legislative Audits) has not seen repeat percentages this high since just prior to 2010,” analyst Christine Timanus explained.
Gov. Moore has said multiple times that his administration inherited problems within these agencies, but he was working on fixing them. However, the problems continued to stack up.
The SSA audit found the entity, which is part of the Department of Human Services, did not have comprehensive procedures in place to ensure people with criminal backgrounds didn’t have access to kids under the state’s care, didn’t ensure foster care children’s medical appointments were kept up, didn’t take the appropriate steps when timely child abuse and neglect investigations were not done, and did not meet federal foster care performance requirements.
The audit also revealed an employee working for a vender providing one-on-one services was convicted of murder in 1990. SSA was not aware of the conviction and could not determine if the person had any unsupervised access to children. Later in the audit, the SSA said the person in question no longer works for the vender.
But guardianship homes and one-on-one services weren’t the only areas where the audit revealed a lack of background checks from the SSA. The agency didn’t always ensure the background checks were done and documented for people working or living at locations for foster care kids, the audit discovered.
Just days after that audit was published, Kanaiyah Ward, 16, was found dead in a Baltimore City hotel while in foster care.
The most recent audit dealing with procurement found the offices in question were exempt or partially exempt from state procurement laws, although they are required to adopt their own procurement policies. However, several agencies, including the state's Lottery and Gaming Control Agency, the Maryland Corps Program, the Maryland State Archives, and the Maryland Energy Administration, had no procurement policies on record.
David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, noted the state’s projected budget deficit is pushing $1.5 billion and the error rate in procurement could “put a dent in the deficit.”
“The problem is we just don’t know where the waste is, where the fraud is,” he said.
On Tuesday, FOX45 News questioned Gov. Moore about the concerns and issues revealed in the string of audits. He said it’s his administration’s job to fix the problems.
“The directive that I have to my agency heads, the directive to my cabinet secretaries is: I don’t care. Fix them,” he said. “We are going to make sure that these systemic or structural problems, are not problems anymore regardless of their origin.”