Correspondence - #52 - Laserfiche WebLink

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For the sake of completeness, we give the discrepancy in each category in the table: Adult and juvenile dogs separately, all dogs combined, adult and juvenile cats separately, all cats combined, and finally dogs and cats put together. It is possible that a deficit in juvenile dogs and a surplus of adult dogs is explained by some dogs reaching adulthood while in the shelter. (But the reverse does not hold. A deficit in adult dogs and a surplus in juvenile dogs cannot offset.) This should be an unusual case, and the total for dogs should have still been correct. Even all these errors combined (as gross and inexcusable as they are) fail to account for the bulk of the discrepancies. The fact is, the numbers almost never add up correctly. OCAC/OCCR might say that these are just approximate statistics, a type of survey. It is no such thing. This is an accounting report and it should match exactly, just like your bank statement or a company's financial statements. That's why it even provides categories for animals being lost. OCAC/OCCR might tell you to just ignore the initial and final counts, because not all other shelters include those. That would be a remarkable change of tune. They'd be saying that they intend to follow only the most lax practice they can find in another shelter, not the Industry Standards. Why? Does OCAC know the number of animals in its care or not? If it does, why do the numbers not add up? If it doesn't, is it just making guesses, and how can the shelter be managed without these numbers? The initial and final counts could should have been derived from the same database tables as the intake and outcome counts. They serve as a check for the correctness of intake and outcome counts. In the absence of this check, the intake and outcome numbers could easily be wrong. If the data is inconsistent, it's inherently untrustworthy. That's the reason the Industry Standards include these counts, and Asilomar expressly states the data check. One person's manual error isn't enough to explain this. A sequence of senior staff surely looked at these numbers. OCAC just publishes half a dozen of these tables per year and it's constantly talking about them. Did nobody pay any attention? And how come these discrepancies are so pervasive? So much for "Industry Standards" and "transparency". Everywhere you look, you find errors, so here's one more. Beginning numbers for one period should equal the ending numbers from the previous period. In your bank statement, the initial balance for 2022 is the final balance for 2021. In OCAC's statistics, that pair of years fails to match. This was already pointed out in a previous report ("OCAC Details.pdf") which OCAC received on April 16 and OCCR saw on April 26 or earlier. Six weeks later, the discrepancy is still there. This is not the only case; two dogs appear magically between the ending count of March 2020 and the beginning count of April 2020. In 2021, the end of Q2 and the beginning of Q3 don't match. Is innumeracy the institutional culture of OCAC and OCCR? Is OCAC trying to avoid scrutiny of its messy data? The 2022 Annual report was not published in January 2023... or in February... or in early March. It was published ONLY when a PRA (23-1127, March 12, 2023) asked for it. The 2023 Q1 report was not published in early April, but rather ONLY on April 26, the day of the Community Outreach Committee meeting, i.e., only when it was impossible to delay it any longer. This report, Jan -Mar 2023, gives the date for the beginning shelter count as 04/01/2023 (in April??) and the date for the ending count date as 6/30/2023 (in June??). After sitting on this report for 25 days, is that the best OCAC/OCCR could do? Animal Counts - Page 5 of 6