The Maryland Department of Health is still fixing issues pointed out by the Office of Legislative Audits in reports from last October, and it may take until the end of 2024 until some of them are corrected.

Usually, OLA checks in with unsatisfactory audits after half a year and then makes sure the agency corrected the issue properly. OLA isn’t getting a chance to do that this time because MDH is taking so long.

Josh Adler, an assistant director at OLA, says part of the reason for the slow implementation is the complexity of the problems.

“I think they are motivated to fix them. It's just some of the problems are systemic. They involve redoing processes, developing procedures,” he said.

OLA and members of the General Assembly have had their eye on MDH after a series of issues dating back to the Hogan Administration popped up in the audits.

One of the most glaring issues was the agency’s mismanagement of government refunds during COVID.

During the pandemic, states typically spent money upfront on COVID-related programs and then were later reimbursed by the federal government.

MDH did not properly apply for those reimbursements, which led to the agency possibly missing out on $1.4 billion in funding.

MDH says it has since recouped a large amount of those funds.

Still, legislators, auditors and agency officials said that there are glaring fiscal issues within MDH that need to be addressed.

“When we started looking and delving into some of the numbers, we saw some very scary things and that's the best way I could describe it,” said Brian Tanen, the director of compliance and performance at OLA. “The details in this are very, very important when you're dealing with 1,200 accounts, dealing with multiple federal grants, multiple federal grant years.”

Other problems MDH is still working on include proper oversight of contractors and having procedures to ensure that employees who were terminated were removed from payroll.