Auditor: Tribe overcharged for jails

By Bill Donovan
Special to the Times

WINDOW ROCK, Jan. 2, 2014

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A review of the payments made by the Navajo Nation for work done on the new Tuba City and Crownpoint tribal jails indicates that the tribe may have been overcharged hundreds of thousands of dollars for the work.

That's the opinion of auditors for the Office of Navajo Auditor General who did a performance audit of the construction. That report was released on Dec. 16.

Tribal officials in charge of overseeing the project disagreed with the auditor's findings.

Unlike regular audits, the complete audit of the judicial complexes is available online at www.navajoauditor.org along with along with a project review by Michael A. Jackson who is with Praxis Program Management in Phoenix.

The two jails were originally budgeted at $61.8 million but tribal officials wanted to add on court buildings which resulted in the two projects ending up at $90.9 million.

The tribe gave the contract to build the new facilities to Arviso, Okland Construction JV with a company called Arcadis being named the project manager and responsible for proposing a budget and overseeing the expenditures.

The Navajo auditors did not review all of the payments. Instead, they looked at a portion of them. For the conclusions on each, pick up a Navajo Times.

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