LANSING, MI (WTVB)- Nearly $1 million worth of alcohol is unaccounted for by the State of Michigan.
It’s after an audit found the state-run distribution system was more than 60,000 bottles short during COVID, and now the House is asking why.
Rep. Jaime Greene of the Oversight Subcommittee on Public Health and Food Security had many questions for the Michigan Liquor Control Commission (MLCC), saying their technology is stuck in the 20th century.
She called the audit showing the MLCC lost track of its product a breaking of public trust in Michigan’s distribution network.
Michigan is one of 17 alcohol control states, meaning vendors sell products to the state rather than stores themselves and then uses its authorized distribution agents and their warehouses to send alcohol to retailers.
But during COVID and the rise in liquor consumption, tens of thousands of bottles couldn’t be accounted for in an audit from the Office of the Auditor General.
The commission says it’s not that the bottles are missing, but that they were incorrectly tracked.
MLCC Business Manager Kerry Krone says “Our system did not properly identify the inventory of the bottles,”
She told the subcommittee part of the problem is that physical inventories were not carried out for a time during the pandemic.
Compounding the problem was the inventory system itself, which is about 50 years old. Krone says a new Sales, Inventory and Purchase system, or “SIPS,” is coming this fall, and they want to make sure they take their time to avoid the pitfalls of further glitches for their retailers.
But that explanation wasn’t accepted by House members like Greene who asked why the state doesn’t have a digital tracking method similar to what’s found at grocery stores.
Krone says the new SIPS system will have a better way of cross-referencing orders.
The commission says its annual sales are nearly $2 billion and it handles more than 10 million cases of alcohol every year.
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