BOISE, Idaho – Idaho State Police say they didn’t conduct an investigation following revelations that private prison company Corrections Corporation of America understaffed a prison and gave the state falsified documents to hide vacancies.
State officials had promised that there would be a criminal probe, but Capt. William Gardiner told The Associated Press on Wednesday that “no detective was assigned. There was no investigation.”
Neither the police nor the Idaho Department of Correction asked to look at CCA’s timesheet software – software that has auditing capabilities designed to catch fraud – and the police apparently didn’t interview any CCA employees. A public records request sent to Idaho State Police by the AP for investigation records was denied, with the police saying no records exist.
Instead, the forensic auditing firm KPMG was hired, and that firm looked at print-outs of time sheet records provided by CCA. KPMG determined that CCA left more than 26,000 hours of mandatory guard posts unstaffed or inadequately covered in 2012, according to the report, which The Associated Press obtained Wednesday. The auditing firm also said that number was likely lower than the actual amount of understaffing because some data was impossible to verify, and left out of the equation. KPMG recommended that the state expand its investigation of CCA’s staffing to additional years.
The Idaho Department of Correction and the Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA announced Tuesday that CCA would pay the state $1 million for understaffing.