Follow-Up on Chicago Animal Care and Control’s Shelter Operations

Executive Summary

The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) has completed a follow-up audit of the Commission on Animal Care and Control (CACC) shelter operations. The purpose of the original audit, released in May of 2013, was to determine if CACC,

• had an appropriate number of shelter staff to care for the quantity of animals it housed;
• conducted veterinary examinations within 24 hours of the intake date for animals involved in neglect and abuse court cases;
• housed animals for the minimum time frame required by relevant laws and policies; and
• accurately tracked animals in the case management software system.

Based upon the results of our 2013 audit, we recommended that CACC,

• fill staff vacancies at the shelter as quickly as possible to ensure that sufficient hours are spent on cleaning and feeding to meet National Animal Control Association (NACA) guidelines;
• routinely evaluate whether the department is meeting the NACA guidelines;
• develop procedures to perform veterinary examinations of animals involved in neglect and abuse court cases in the required time periods in order to ensure full and timely documentation and evidentiary value of the reports;
• review its veterinary examination procedures related to court case animals and implement management controls to ensure a) animals related to neglect and abuse court cases are correctly identified at intake and b) veterinarians are promptly notified of the intake of such animals;
• design and implement procedures to ensure adoption records related to offsite events are brought back to CACC and processed in a timely manner; and
• research all animals noted as “missing” during an inventory and update the case management system to ensure it accurately reflects the animals housed at the facility.

In its response to the findings and recommendations, CACC described a number of corrective actions it planned to pursue.

The purpose of this follow-up audit was to determine the status of those corrective actions. The follow-up audit concludes that CACC has fully implemented corrective actions and, in doing so, corrected the issues that OIG identified in the original audit.