What does deferred maintenance look like, exactly? Much has been written in recent decades about the battle that institutional and commercial facilities have been waging against the backlog of needed repairs and maintenance that seems to grow each year due to a lack of funds. The situation is especially dire for organizations that rely on taxpayer money for their operations and activities.
But how does that challenge play out in a department’s daily operations and management? A recent report on the state of Virginia’s efforts to maintain and repair its facilities offers key insights into the financial and institutional challenges facing many maintenance and engineering departments.
The organization that maintains Virginia’s government buildings was found to be behind on over 1,500 projects, unpaid on work orders more than a decade old and with overall poor or inaccurate record-keeping on repairs it did perform, according to WRIC.
The Office of the State Inspector General (OSIG) performed an audit on the Virginia Department of General Services’ facilities maintenance division, which maintains 73 state facilities in Richmond. The audit was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the way the division tracks and handles the maintenance of these buildings.
The audit found that a total of 1,649 preventive maintenance work orders were overdue. If the division cannot complete preventive maintenance on an asset on its typical schedule, it can delay the work order in its internal system. OSIG took a random sample of 70 work orders between July 1 and Dec 31, 2023, and found that all of them had been deferred in this way at least once.
Also, nearly three out of four of the examined work orders were for assets with previous deferrals, meaning an order for maintenance of that asset had been deferred before. Each of those same assets also had past tickets that had never been completed or closed.
The OSIG also found that the facilities maintenance division was not allowing several invoices to remain unpaid — some for over a decade. State auditors examined 14 randomly selected special work orders that were closed during the audit period. For six of those orders, there was no evidence the division had ever been paid for its services. In fact, it had not even sent out invoices to collect payments, which totaled $27,306.
The OSIG then pulled an aging report of all special work payments owed to the division at the time of the audit. The report contained 10 projects that were completed or invoiced between 2011 and 2019, but the division had never collected payment for the work. These unpaid projects totaled $88,585.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
