Graham Lee Brewer
The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City
(MCT)
The state’s food provider responded this week to allegations the company violated its contract with Oklahoma.
On Dec. 16 the Office of Management and Enterprise Services sent Houston-based Sysco Foods a notification after the state Corrections Department said it discovered several contract breaches through an internal data collection program.
The department found Sysco has violated five areas of the contract, including provisions dealing with pricing, reporting of out of stock items, and lack of communication on specials and deals.
Sysco signed a contract with the state of Oklahoma in October 2009 to provide food for 181 state entities until August 2015.
In the letter to Sysco, State Purchasing Director Scott Schlotthauer asked the company to respond within five business days with a plan of action on how the company will resolve the issues.
In their response, Sysco outlined several areas where it plans to implement better practices, including better oversight of product changes, increased updating on the availability of items and the elimination of automatic substitutions for out-of-stock products and stronger monitoring of price fluctuations.
The response was a good first step, said John Estus, spokesman for the Office of Management and Enterprise Services.
“The purchasing director will be contacting company officials soon to make sure all contractual issues are resolved by Jan. 31 or before that date,” he said.
Sysco is asking the state to give it until the end of January to implement the changes.
One alleged contract breach, and perhaps the most important to the state Corrections Department, was price discrepancies found for the same products delivered to different prisons.
“We are still researching this issue as the examples the State provided do not match our records,” the letter from Sysco stated. “Our records show the same prices on all of those items.”
The differences in prices were first discovered through a data collection program created and operated by inmates at the Joseph Harp Correctional Center in Lexington.
The program initially was developed to monitor inmates during chow time.
By entering each inmate in a computer system as they receive their food, Corrections Department employees hoped to catch prisoners who were getting back in line and receiving a second meal. The program also monitored food items being delivered to the facility.
As chair of the House Government Modernization Committee, Rep. Jason Murphey, R-Guthrie, has been looking into ways state agencies can find inefficiencies through increased use of electronic monitoring.
Murphey said the program utilized by kitchen staff at the Joseph Harp is a perfect example of how such programs can work, adding he would like to see similar initiatives taken in other state departments. He said while the program worked very well and taxpayers should be grateful, its findings illustrate how vital it is for the state to integrate more use of electronic oversight.
“They’ve got to have those tools in place so this cannot happen,” Murphey said. “The point that it did points to a real need for real-time electronic monitoring of contract performance on Central Purchasing’s part.”
State Corrections Department spokesman Jerry Massie said last week the data collection program has been in place at Joseph Harp for about two years. The program has since been applied to all of the state’s medium- and maximum-security facilities.
Massie said the department is waiting to see how Sysco responds before deciding if it will be necessary to apply the program to the remaining prisons in the state.
Sysco Oklahoma did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.