Rhode Island's Coastal Regulator Forfeited $191,110 in Federal Funds
Summary
A Rhode Island Office of Internal Audit and Program Integrity review of the Coastal Resources Management Council, covering July 2024 through January 2026, found the agency missed drawdown deadlines on two federal coastal-management grants and forfeited $191,110 -- money the state's general fund then had to cover in its place. The same review found CRMC owed the University of Rhode Island $1,020,000 for wind-farm monitoring work as of June 30, 2025, with no liability recorded on CRMC's own books; one invoice went unpaid for more than three years before CRMC finally sent $600,000 in December 2025. Two more federal grant awards, worth a combined $3,922,389, were never entered into the state's grant-tracking system at all. The agency has had no chief financial officer since its last audit in 2003.
Money left on the table
CRMC receives ongoing federal funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration () to help run Rhode Island's federally approved coastal-management program. Of the four most recent awards in the audit's review window, the 2022 grant expired September 30, 2024, and the 2023 grant expired March 31, 2025 -- and as of January 31, 2026, $191,110 remained undrawn under those two expired awards. Once an award expires, the money is gone: federal grant rules only allow funds to be drawn during the approved performance period, absent an extension. Auditors traced the failure to a lack of routine monitoring of award periods and reconciliation of spending to drawdowns -- and because CRMC had already incurred the expenditures the grants were meant to cover, the forfeiture meant the state's general revenue had to pay for them instead.
A university invoice, three years unpaid
CRMC also subcontracts wind-farm structural-monitoring work to the University of Rhode Island (URI) under two federal awards from the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement -- Project A, an $1.8 million award tied to the South Fork Wind Farm, and Project B, a $750,000 award for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot. Under the arrangement, URI invoices CRMC as it completes work, and CRMC is supposed to draw the federal money and pass it through. As of January 31, 2026, CRMC had drawn $400,000 against Project A but paid URI nothing at all, despite $800,000 in outstanding invoices dating back to April 2025. Project B was worse: URI's invoices ran back to September 2022, and CRMC didn't make its first payment -- $600,000 -- until December 2025, more than three years later. Of the $730,000 URI had invoiced, $130,000 was still outstanding, and CRMC's request to draw that final $130,000 wasn't submitted until after the Project B award had already expired.
View data as table
| Project A ($1.8M award, active) | $800,000 invoiced / $0 paid | $800,000 outstanding |
|---|---|---|
| Project B ($750K award, expired Oct. 2025) | $730,000 invoiced / $600,000 paid | $130,000 still outstanding; draw requested after expiration |
The unpaid invoices produced a matching hole in CRMC's own books. As of June 30, 2025, CRMC owed URI $1,020,000 combined across both projects -- URI had recorded the receivable in the state's financial system, but CRMC never recorded the matching payable, so its financial statements simply didn't show the debt. By January 31, 2026, after the December payment, the unrecorded liability had shrunk only to $930,000. Auditors called this a deficiency in internal control: CRMC has no formalized process to reconcile what it owes contractors against what it's actually recorded, and no supervisory review catches the gap.
Fees that don't follow the fee schedule
CRMC also collects fees for the permits and "assents" it issues for coastal construction and development. State regulation sets those fees on a tiered schedule tied to a project's estimated cost. Testing a sample of 25 fee transactions, OIAPI found CRMC issued a Certificate of Maintenance for an $89,000 project and charged $35 -- a 92.9% undercharge against the $495 the fee schedule required. CRMC's written response didn't dispute the number, but explained the shortfall wasn't a documentation lapse: a prior executive director had set an internal policy treating solar-panel installation as routine maintenance, deserving a flat $35 fee regardless of project cost, a policy OIAPI's finding didn't account for. In the same sample, one applicant was overcharged $2,500 -- $25,938 paid against a correct fee of $23,438 -- and that refund still hadn't gone out as of the report, pending guidance from the state Treasury.
CRMC also doesn't deposit application-fee checks until after it approves the application, rather than on receipt, and checks sat an average of 26 days before deposit. Forty-nine checks worth $49,518, dated between March 18 and June 25, 2025, weren't deposited until July -- after fiscal year 2025 had already closed on June 30 -- misstating that year's revenue by $49,518.
View data as table
| Forfeited (money the state actually lost) | $191,110 |
|---|---|
| Unrecorded liability (money owed, not on the books) | $930,000 |
| Untracked in state system (money awarded, not logged) | $3,922,389 |
Grants the state didn't know it had
Every federal grant a Rhode Island agency receives is supposed to be logged in the state's Grants Management System (GMS), the tool the Office of Accounts and Control uses to track and process federal money. Cross-checking CRMC's GMS entries against the federal government's own USASpending.gov database, OIAPI found two federal awards -- $1,578,389 and $2,344,000, both beginning October 1, 2025 -- that had never been entered into the GMS at all. Without an entry, CRMC can't process financial transactions against those grants through the normal system, and the state's public dashboards of federal subawards by agency don't reflect them either.
CRMC's reporting to its own state overseers has lagged too. As of the audit's June 24, 2026 report date, CRMC hadn't submitted either of its two required fiscal 2026 quarterly reports to the state Office of Management and Budget -- the first was due October 30, 2025, the second January 30, 2026 -- and its fiscal 2027 operating budget, due September 24, 2025, arrived 49 days late on November 12, 2025. CRMC's management said the delays traced to a new staffer's learning curve on the state's ERP/Workday system, not a lack of internal procedure, and that the second-quarter report had in fact been filed but outside the system OIAPI checked.
The root cause: no one owns the books
OIAPI's report treats the fee errors, the missed drawdowns, and the unbooked debt as symptoms of one underlying problem: CRMC has never had a chief financial officer or a dedicated senior finance official. The agency argued for the position after its previous state audit -- in 2003 -- and was told the agency was too small to justify it. Instead, financial duties fell to CRMC's longtime Chief Resource Specialist, alongside that employee's other regulatory work. CRMC's written response points to the state's recent transition to the ERP/Workday accounting system as a compounding strain; OIAPI's own reply in the report notes that the delayed payments and unrecorded liabilities predate that transition, confirmed by examining the state's prior financial system directly. CRMC now says it will seek a dedicated finance hire immediately, repurposing an existing position, or request one in its fiscal 2028 budget if that fails.
- CRMC forfeited $191,110 in federal coastal-management money by missing its own drawdown deadlines -- the one failure in this audit where the dollars are actually gone, covered instead by the state's general revenue.
- It owed the University of Rhode Island $1,020,000 for wind-farm monitoring work that never showed up on its own books -- one invoice went three years unpaid before a $600,000 catch-up payment in December 2025, with $130,000 still outstanding on an already-expired award.
- Two more federal awards, worth $3,922,389 combined, weren't even logged in the state's grant-tracking system -- caught only when auditors cross-checked a federal database CRMC doesn't control. The agency has operated without a chief financial officer since its last audit flagged the same gap in 2003.
All figures in this piece come from the Rhode Island Office of Internal Audit and Program Integrity's June 24, 2026 performance audit of the Coastal Resources Management Council, read in full via direct PDF fetch. The audit redacted certain personnel-performance details in CRMC's management responses; none of those redactions bear on the dollar figures reported here. The 92.9% fee-undercharge figure, the 49-day budget-submission delay, and the $130,000 Project B arithmetic check are this outlet's own computations on the audit's own stated figures; the audit does not itself state these as percentages or day-counts. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary document alone with no access to this draft, independently checked every itemized fact; see verification.json.
Sources(1) ▾
- Rhode Island Office of Management and Budget, Office of Internal Audit and Program Integrity (OIAPI), Office of Internal Audit and Program Integrity Report: Coastal Resources Management Council (Performance Audit) (2026-06-24) — The primary document: OIAPI's performance audit of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC), covering the period July 1, 2024 through January 31, 2026, evaluating CRMC's financial and federal-grants-management controls. Source for the $191,110 in forfeited coastal-management grant funds (Finding #2, p.7); the $1,020,000 (as of June 30, 2025) and $930,000 (as of January 31, 2026) unrecorded liabilities owed to the University of Rhode Island for two wind-farm monitoring subcontracts (Finding #3, pp.9-11, Figure 1); the permit/assent application-fee errors including the $35-vs-$495 fee and the $2,500 applicant overpayment (Finding #4, pp.13-16); the $49,518 late-deposit misstatement (Finding #4, p.13); the two federal grant awards worth $1,578,389 and $2,344,000 never entered in the state's Grants Management System (Finding #5, pp.16-17); CRMC's missed FY2026 quarterly reports and late FY2027 budget submission to the state Office of Management and Budget (Finding #6, p.18); and the root-cause finding that CRMC has had no chief financial officer or dedicated senior finance official since its prior audit in 2003 (Finding #1, pp.4-5). Management's responses to each finding, including CRMC's account of the ERP/Workday transition and its rebuttal on the $35 solar-panel fee policy, are drawn from the same document. omb.ri.gov
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The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) is the state's independent coastal regulator, established in 1971 to permit and police activity along Rhode Island's shoreline. A performance audit by the state Office of Internal Audit and Program Integrity (OIAPI), covering July 2024 through January 2026, found the agency's ledgers didn't match its actual obligations in three separate ways: it let $191,110 in federal money expire unclaimed, it owed a partner university over $1 million it never booked as a debt, and it had two federal grant awards worth nearly $4 million that weren't even entered into the state's own tracking system.