FEDERAL Aviation Administration officials were on island two weeks ago to discuss with Commonwealth Ports Authority a “corrective action plan” to address the findings of a single audit conducted last year.
In his report to the board on Tuesday last week, CPA Executive Director Christopher Tenorio said FAA Director of Compliance Kevin Willis and Director of the Office of the Western Pacific Region Mark McClardy were in the CNMI from Aug. 21 to 23, 2023.
He said the FAA officials and CPA management discussed the single audit corrective action plan, among other things.
In an interview during a break from the CPA board meeting, CPA Chairwoman Kimberlyn King-Hinds said the visit gave CPA an opportunity to directly engage with Willis and show the progress that CPA has made in implementing corrective measures.
King-Hinds said they are very proud of the work CPA has completed over the year, adding that they anticipate that FAA officials will be back to “basically accept the measures that we have been implementing.”
She said CPA is hoping to hear from the federal officials within the next month or so.
A lot of the findings pertain to standard operation procedures or SOPs, King-Hinds said.
“I think we take things for granted because they are common sense but really, I think that sometimes people don’t have the ability to break down step by step what is needed to be done,” she said. “These SOPs basically with regards to the action plan allow the staff to be able to do it right and make a checklist, for example, when they go into the procurement process,” she added.
One of the biggest challenges is identifying inventory that has not been properly described on [a] list. “If you don’t know what you are looking for, you can’t find it,” she said.
One of the things CPA has been doing is training its people. “And you wouldn’t believe the amount of training that we’ve been doing just this last year. We have been doing writing training, ethics training related to procurement, and a lot of other training sessions,” she said.
In addition, “we have hired an internal auditor who actually comes and does a spot audit.”
As a result, she added, “we’re no longer seeing some of the deficiencies anymore because they are not making the same mistakes.”
King-Hinds said she is very proud of the achievements and accomplishments of the CPA staff.
Although they don’t expect the current audit to be clean because some of the corrective action plans were implemented when the audit was already ongoing, “we do anticipate that the next audit should be a clean one,” King-Hinds said.
Christopher Tenorio
