A state audit has found that Colorado taxpayers spent close to $175,000 on cellphones issued to state government employees that were never used, raising questions about oversight and accountability across multiple departments.

Roughly 400 of the 6,688 state-issued phones examined in the audit went virtually untouched — no calls, texts, or cellular data — for the entire year. Departments claimed that at least some of those phones sit idle by design, reserved for emergencies, and that canceling service would cost more than keeping it. However, auditors could not verify which phones were emergency-only because of "unreliable or incomplete" department records.

The Departments of Corrections, Human Services, Natural Resources, Public Safety and Transportation spent a combined $6.7 million on 10,000 employee cellphones. Those five departments failed to provide documentation showing prior approval before issuing the phones, and they did not keep signed usage agreements as required by the Office of the State Controller. With no central cellphone clearinghouse, individual units bought and managed accounts across multiple carriers.

Audit officials described the recordkeeping failures as a systemic risk. "These issues create the risks that state-issued cellphones may be issued unnecessarily and employees may not understand their responsibilities related to the cellphones," said audit manager Vicki Heller.

Problems extended to carrier oversight as well. In Fiscal Years 2023 and 2025, the Department of Personnel and Administration did not receive nine of the 24 required quarterly sales reports from Verizon and AT&T. Others were missing sales and usage data for more than 1,000 state-issued phones through Verizon and T-Mobile.

The cellphone audit does not allege broader malfeasance, but auditors and observers noted that the recordkeeping gaps make it difficult to rule anything out. If something worse than idle phones were buried in $6.7 million of annual cellular billing, nothing in this audit suggests the state would catch it on its own.

The findings come against a backdrop of other recent state spending concerns. Two years ago, Medicaid officials flagged $25 million in unusual billings over a single four-month stretch, and dozens of providers were suspended. This year, prosecutors charged two transportation companies with defrauding the state's nonemergency medical transportation program — billing for rides that never happened and ones given to friends and family, for impossible distances. That program had undergone a rate overhaul after a 2021 advisory panel recommended steep increases based on what was later described as a faulty analysis, and its costs subsequently jumped to roughly $300 million a year.

Whether the state will implement centralized phone management controls or pursue recovery of the misspent funds has not yet been reported.