Audit Finds 200 Animals Missing at 2 Shelters

An audit has found that in a single month about 200 animals held at two Los Angeles County shelters were missing and that animal control staffers could not say whether they had been miscounted, put to sleep or stolen.

In a review of the Department of Animal Care and Control by the county auditor-controller, auditors found during one study last March that 145 animals could not be accounted for at the Baldwin Park shelter and 39 at the Lancaster shelter. Another 15 animals turned up missing in a separate study the same month at the same two facilities, plus a third shelter in Downey. The untraceable animals were “primarily cats and dogs,” Mort Carson, a principal accountant-auditor said. But the numbers also included “a bat, a couple of skunks, snakes, ferrets, a possum, one duck and one horse.”

Fifth Critical Report

The auditor-controller’s report, obtained by The Times on Thursday, is the fifth done over the last year that has been critical of the department’s security, personnel policies and animal control procedures.

A study by the Humane Society of the United States late last year strongly suggested that animals were being stolen from some of the six county shelters, which handle about 95,000 animals a year.

Earlier this year, an animal control officer at the Baldwin Park shelter, David Robert Gatica, was arrested for stealing a Rottweiler dog from the facility and reselling it. He pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property and awaits sentencing.

County Supervisor Mike Antonovich said Thursday he had requested the audit into alleged financial and other irregularities after questions had been raised about department practices.

The findings did not specify any misappropriation of county funds, but recommended improvements in the department’s handling of cash payments, license fee collections and billing procedures, and called for a “clear separation” between the department and the Los Angeles County Animal Care Foundation. That is a private, nonprofit, fund-raising corporation benefiting the department, but is headed by the department’s director, Brian H. Berger.

Missing Animals

The strongest recommendations addressed the missing animals.

“The department needs to develop/strengthen monitoring procedures to ensure that all animals . . . are properly accounted for,” the report said, adding improvements should be made in security as well, “to minimize the risk of animal thefts.”

Berger said Thursday he believes that the untraced animals can largely be explained by “gaps in the accounting procedure. I don’t believe we have rampant theft.”

“In some cases, they (the missing animals) never existed,” Berger said, but were the product of duplicate records made when “animals were moved from one cage to another.”

Berger also described what he called staff “slip-ups” in filling out euthanasia reports. The 184 animals the audit had found unaccounted for in two shelters had been recorded on department records as having been put to sleep, but euthanasia records did not match.

“When you’re spread over 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Berger said, “there’s no one person that does all the bumping.”

“Bumping,” he said, meant “putting animals to sleep.”

Berger said he had moved to implement a new key system for animal cages and a new computerized animal identification system.

But Mary Ann Masey, a board member of Actors and Others for Animals, which has been a persistent critic of the department, said Thursday her group was “shocked and appalled” by the auditor’s report: “The department has been run in a less than professional manner, jeopardizing the animals under their care.”

Reacting to the report, Board of Supervisors Chairman Deane Dana said he did not find it “particularly critical,” and added: “You do an audit of any department and you’ll find these sorts of things.”

But Antonovich said he was disturbed by the audit’s findings and was worried that they could undermine the confidence of pet owners who use county animal shelters. He said he will ask his colleagues next week to support the report’s recommendations.