Politics
Maryland audit finds gaps in oversight of outside legal spending
A state audit found Maryland’s attorney general’s office lacked adequate controls to track outside law firms hired by state agencies, leaving the full cost of the work uncertain. Auditors also questioned a $1.8 million case-management system that remained incomplete after its contract expired.
Maryland’s Office of the Attorney General did not have adequate procedures to track and oversee state agencies’ use of outside law firms, making it difficult to determine how much public money was spent on legal services, a state audit found.
The review, released Tuesday by the Office of Legislative Audits, examined contracts from June 2022 through May 2026. Auditors identified 120 contracts with 97 law firms, totaling nearly $63 million. The report said five agencies accounted for more than 60% of the legal fees it tracked, with nearly $40 million paid by those agencies.
The audit cautioned that the actual total may be higher. Some agencies paid for legal services on behalf of other government entities, while other payments were not entered in the state accounting system. Auditors said those gaps prevented them from determining the total fees attributable to each agency or identifying all claims and settlements paid.
The contracts’ combined value was roughly 70% of the attorney general’s office’s $86 million fiscal 2025 budget. The findings concern legal work commissioned by state agencies, not solely the attorney general’s own spending.
Attorney General Anthony Brown agreed with the findings in a letter to auditors and said his office was committed to corrective action. The office said it is building a central repository of outside-counsel contracts, an effort begun about three years ago that it expects to finish by the end of 2027.
The office also said it does not have the authority or tools to monitor how client agencies process and pay outside-counsel invoices. It plans to issue guidance to agencies on tracking contracts and recording payments by the end of 2027.
Auditors separately criticized the office’s handling of a case-management system that cost $1.8 million but was not fully implemented before its contract expired in June 2025. They said the office did not obtain required information, including weekly progress reports, to assess the vendor’s work.
The report said the office did not tell the Board of Public Works about continuing vendor problems when seeking approval for a contract extension. The board approved an extension costing $475,000. Auditors said the payment should have been withheld until the system was fully implemented.
As of April 2026, about a year after the contract ended—and seven years after the original estimated implementation date—the system was still not implemented in one division and only partly implemented in another, auditors wrote. The issue had also appeared in an earlier audit, when the office said it would address the problems by June 2023.