UCHRA Decreases Amount Owed to TDOT to $92K

The Upper Cumberland Human Resources Agency (UCHRA) has decreased its total amount owed to the Tennessee Department of Transportation following an audit report earlier this year.

Executive Director Mark Farley says the agency has decreased the initial $130,000 owed to the state down to about $92,000.

“We still believe there are some areas where we are going to attempt to try and justify some of the actions taken and maybe reduce that amount even more,” Farley says. “But at the end of the day, it’s going to be somewhere in that ballpark of what we owe back to the state. The state offered us a repayment plan and we’ll obviously be able to spread that out over a couple years.”

An audit report released earlier this year highlighted several questionable expenditures made by the agency, resulting in the request from the state to the agency to repay the monies owed.

Farley says the agency was able to reduce some of the money owed back by verifying its use in several different areas.

“It’s just a matter of some of those things were reimbursements that were made that they didn’t see initially,” Farley says. “Some are with salaries that were initially viewed to be inaccurate. But once we went back and supplied the documentation, it was shown that they were accurate.”

Farley says TDOT was able to work with the agency in creating the payment plan given their current financial status.

“That helps us. One of the things is UCHRA is not as strong financially as where it needs to be,” Farley says. “Obviously the state understands any time you need to repay a large chunk of money, that might take just a little bit of time to do that. And by spreading it out, that allows us to sort of spread it out over a couple different fiscal years.”

TDOT’s audit report initially stated nearly $84,000 of the questionable expenses billed to transportation grants came from nutrition program, human resources, and other employees not included in the UCHRA’s approved allocation plan.

The expenditures occurred prior to Former Executive Director Luke Collins’s departure from the agency.