A Texas College Couldn't Locate 26% of the Assets Auditors Tested
Summary
A Texas State Auditor's Office review physically tested 70 assets the Lamar Institute of Technology's own records said it owned and could not find 18 of them on campus. The Institute ran none of its required monthly surprise inventory checks in fiscal 2025, and 56 of the 60 disposals auditors tested left the books without the required paperwork. A sister campus, Lamar State College - Port Arthur, still listed 15 laptops as active more than a year after they were first reported missing.
A year without a single surprise check
The Institute's own policy requires a full annual physical inventory plus ongoing monthly surprise audits, conducted by the property manager throughout the year. The Institute ran none of those surprise audits in fiscal year 2025⧉. Its Information Technology department, meanwhile, could not verify 391 of its own 2,617 assets during the year's inventory certification -- 15 percent⧉, and because the Institute never followed up on certification results, it never triggered the missing-property reports its own policy calls for when items go unaccounted for. The same breakdown showed up on the way out the door: for 5 of 10 departing employees tested -- half -- the Institute could not show that anyone verified their assigned equipment had been returned⧉, including one employee who had been terminated for cause.
View data as table
| Lamar Institute of Technology | 25.7% | 18 of 70 sampled assets not found on campus |
|---|---|---|
| Lamar State College - Port Arthur | 7.1% | 5 of 70 sampled assets not found on campus |
| Lamar State College - Orange | 0% | all 70 sampled assets located and properly tagged |
Equipment left the books without a signature
Disposing of an asset is supposed to leave a paper trail -- a signed removal form and, for information-technology equipment, sign-off from IT staff, before anything leaves campus. At the Institute, 56 of the 60 disposals auditors tested -- 93 percent -- had neither⧉. At Lamar State College - Port Arthur, the shortfall was total: none of the 13 disposals auditors tested had a completed disposal form⧉ documenting how the equipment was retired. Port Arthur's inventory records also still listed 15 laptops as active⧉ more than a year after they had first been flagged lost or missing in the prior year's inventory -- nobody had gone back to check.
View data as table
| Lamar Institute of Technology | 93.3% | 56 of 60 disposals tested lacked a removal form or required approval |
|---|---|---|
| Lamar State College - Port Arthur | 100% | 13 of 13 disposals tested lacked a completed disposal form |
| Lamar State College - Orange | 20% | 3 of 15 disposals tested did not follow the required process |
One campus passed the same test
Lamar State College - Orange, the third institution in the audit, physically located all 70 of its sampled assets⧉, each correctly tagged with a complete and accurate record. It wasn't spotless -- 3 of 15 disposals tested skipped the required process⧉ -- but auditors rated its overall controls LOW risk, against HIGH for the Institute and MEDIUM for Port Arthur. All three institutions were tested under the same state law, Texas Government Code Section 403.273⧉, and answer to the same governing board, the Texas State University System; all three agreed with every recommendation in the report⧉.
- A quarter of a college's tracked equipment is unaccounted for. Auditors physically tested 70 assets the Lamar Institute of Technology's own records said it owned and could not find 18 of them on campus -- after a year in which the Institute ran zero of the monthly surprise audits its own policy requires.
- Retired equipment left the books without a signature. 56 of 60 disposals tested at the Institute, and all 13 tested at Lamar State College - Port Arthur, lacked the removal form or approval internal policy requires -- and Port Arthur's records still carried 15 laptops as active more than a year after they were first reported missing.
- One sister campus, same law, clean result. Lamar State College - Orange, tested under the identical Texas Government Code standard and the same Texas State University System oversight, located all 70 of its sampled assets; all three institutions agreed to every recommendation in the report.
Findings are drawn from the Texas State Auditor's Office's "An Audit of Asset Management at the Lamar State Colleges," Report No. 26-029 (June 2026)⧉ -- read directly in full. The 70-asset physical-verification and disposal-testing results at each institution are nonstatistical, risk-based-plus-random samples the auditors themselves say should not be projected onto the full asset populations (3,675 at the Institute, 2,840 at Port Arthur, 2,862 at Orange); this piece treats them as what auditors found in those specific samples, not as population-wide estimates. The report does not state a dollar value for the missing or undocumented assets, and this piece does not estimate one. Percentages in the analysis were independently recomputed against the report's own counts.
Sources(1) ▾
- Texas State Auditor's Office, An Audit of Asset Management at the Lamar State Colleges (Report No. 26-029) (2026-06-11) — The Texas State Auditor's Office's performance audit of asset-management processes at three Texas State University System institutions -- the sole evidentiary basis for this piece's figures. Source for the audit objective and scope (Appendix 1, p. 12), the overview ratings by institution (Overview, p. 1), the Lamar Institute of Technology physical-verification, tagging, disposal, annual-certification, monthly-surprise-audit, and offboarding findings (Chapter 1, pp. 3-5), the Lamar State College - Port Arthur physical-verification, missing-asset, and surprise-audit findings (Chapter 2, pp. 7-8), the Lamar State College - Orange findings (Chapter 3, p. 10), the sampling populations and methodology (Appendix 1, pp. 13-16), and the institutions' agreement with all recommendations (Overview, Summary of Management's Response, p. 2). sao.texas.gov · original document
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When the Texas State Auditor's Office⧉ tested a sample of equipment the Lamar Institute of Technology's own inventory records said it owned, it could not find more than a quarter of it. Auditors physically checked 70 controlled and capitalized assets pulled from the Institute's records; 18 of them -- 26 percent -- were nowhere to be found on campus⧉. The Institute, in Beaumont, is one of three Texas State University System colleges the auditor's office tested in the same review; the other two -- Lamar State College - Port Arthur and Lamar State College - Orange -- came out noticeably worse, and noticeably better.