[Riverside County] Grand jury says Riverside County's $36 million KPMG project hasn't paid off

The Riverside County Civil Grand Jury has found that the county has benefited relatively little from the $36.4 million the Board of Supervisors paid to consulting giant KPMG to identify cost-cutting opportunities in the county's public safety services, according to a grand jury report.

In its report, issued earlier this month, the grand jury disagreed with claims made by officials in the Riverside County Executive Office to the Board of Supervisors in August 2018 that more than $100 million in savings had been achieved due to KPMG's work.

The grand jury reported that when it asked the executive office to provide further accounting proving the legitimacy of these purported savings, namely among the county's sheriff's department and district attorney's office, officials with the executive office couldn't.

As a result, the claims of savings among those two departments, the grand jury reported, "lack validation."

The county's civil grand jury is comprised of county residents and provides oversight into the operations of county and municipal governments. It files its reports with the county's presiding judge and does not discipline the governmental bodies it is charged with investigating.

However, those agencies it investigates are required to respond to the grand jury's findings and recommendations.

County board Chairman V.  Manuel Perez, who represents the Fourth District, which includes the Coachella Valley, will discuss the formation of a committee to respond to the "grand jury KPMG report" during the supervisors' Aug. 25 meeting.

The report

In an effort to understand the project's benefits, the grand jury interviewed 22 current and former county elected officials, including staff who worked on the project from both the county and KPMG.

Ultimately, the grand jury identified that some project recommendations, like those made to fleet services, resulted in about $7 million in savings. Other recommendations, like the failed roll out of a new human resources software, cost at least $8 million before it was abandoned completely. And still other recommendations could not be thoroughly investigated because departments did not provide them with the requested information.

The grand jury acknowledged that the KPMG project's timeline, roughly 2016 to late 2019, has been plagued by a series of events that threatened its success, including what the grand jury described as the county's "significant political turmoil."

Palm Springs Desert Sun
Christopher Damien
August 20, 2020