Grand Jury Tells County Purchasing Rules Needed

San Diego County’s method of purchasing products and administering contracts leaves it vulnerable to bribes, kickbacks and favoritism in contract awards, the county grand jury said in a report released Thursday.

To avoid those pitfalls, the county should centralize its contracting and purchasing functions, and bar members of the Board of Supervisors from participating in negotiations between the government and private firms, the jury said.

In addition, the county should allow itself the option of canceling any contract if the contractor hires within two years a county employee who helped negotiate the deal, the four-page interim report said.

Thursday’s report was the second in three years critical of the county’s purchasing procedures. A similar grand jury report was issued in October, 1982, but prompted little change.

This time, the jury criticized the county’s practice of allowing individual departments--such as Health Services, Social Services and Public Works--to choose the source of products bought from the private sector and to administer contracts directly, without the supervision of the Purchasing and Contracting Department.

“This is a practice which is considered unacceptable in private business operations and is fraught with opportunities for unscrupulous employees to engage in unethical or illegal activities involving favoritism in contract awards, bribes and kickbacks,” the report said.

Instead, those duties should be transferred to the Purchasing and Contracting Department, with each of the other departments maintaining a single person to work as a liaison with purchasing, the report said.

According to the jury, some county departments defend the current system on the grounds that state regulations on contracting are so strict that the use of purchasing department personnel would be superfluous. Other departments, the report said, maintain that their requirements are so different that the purchasing department is not equipped to draw up bids or properly administer the contracts once they are awarded.

“These are age-old invalid arguments which serve only to enhance the position of the department and isolate the activities of the department from a healthy system of checks and balances,” the report said.

The report said it is risky to allow county workers to be hired by a business with whom they have negotiated a contract.

“While such a practice may not be illegal, the promise of a job or the imagined opportunity for a job may unduly influence the judgment of a county employee dealing with a contractor,” the report said.

County Supervisor Susan Golding, who has been critical of the county’s purchasing and contracting procedures since she took office in January, said she welcomed the grand jury’s report.

“My judgment is that we don’t have strict enough guidelines,” Golding said. “Many of my questions of staff have reflected my concern with a lack of consistency. When you don’t have consistency, that’s when problems can develop.”

Golding has already asked the county’s legal counsel to develop an ordinance regulating the private-sector employment of county workers who negotiate contracts. Soon, Golding said, she will propose the formation of a task force made up of representatives from private business to examine the county’s procedures.

“I think it’s time to make a thorough review of the whole system,” she said.

James Tapp, director of the Purchasing and Contracting Department, was not available for comment Thursday.