DOT may waste money paying bills

SANTA FE (KRQE) - At least one state agency may be spending more money than it needs to when it pays its bills.

That’s according to a bookkeeper for a company that provides car and truck parts for the New Mexico Department of Transportation. “Julie” didn’t want to reveal her identity for fear of losing state business.

“It gets to be fun to see how much mail comes in and see how many yellow envelopes we can pick right out of there,” Julie told News 13.

Prior to last summer, DOT would consolidate the invoices Julie’s company submitted into lump check payments, she said. But in August, Julie received several separate state checks in one day. Then, more and more checks began to roll in on a daily basis.

"I just thought it was a gross amount of waste," Julie said.

Six separate checks arrived on Aug. 3. They came about two at a time in the days following that. Then, on Aug. 23, 12 individual checks arrived. That's when the office jokes started, Julie said.

Multiple checks kept coming in daily for months. But it really got out of control in November, she said.

"At one point we got 25 checks in a day,” Julie said. “I just thought that that was a lot of spending.”

Also, Julie noticed that some of the regular-sized envelopes had postage of $5.54. The rest of the envelopes had postage marked 44-cents.

Finally, some of the checks were for just a couple of bucks a piece, Julie said.

"I'd like to see them combine payments under one check that would be the ultimate,” she said.

News 13 asked Ricky Bejarano, state controller with the Department of Finance and Administration, why as many as 25 checks came to this vendor in one day.

"That, from my perspective, is absurd and I'd want to talk to that vendor," he said.

Bejarano said checks can be paid individually for accounting and tracking reasons. But even then, he said the state tries to combine payments when it can.

He said they try to send out payment to vendors as soon as possible and doesn’t want to hold on to money for businesses that might be hurting for funds.

"Because most especially in this economy, businesses are struggling,” Bejarano said. “We want to get the money to them as quickly as possible.”

Still, nobody with the either the finance department or the transportation department could say for sure why check-paying procedures changed last summer. The state said the over-paid postage is probably a mistake, but officials are looking into it.

As for Julie, her company is only one of about 30 percent of businesses that contract with the state that do not use direct deposit to receive payments. Julie said she didn't even know about it until News 13 let her know. She said she will consider signing up for it to avoid receiving so many checks in one day.

The state pays thousands of bills every day. With 49,000 invoices totaling $835 million last year, the Department of Transportation forks out the most.