However, the Bureau has not conducted these audits as scheduled. Although the planned audit cycle is more than half over, only 5 percent of the required audits have been completed and an additional 7 percent are in progress. The Bureau is statutorily responsible for assisting in the location and identification of missing children. As a result, the Bureau facilitates the comparison of school district information on new or transfer students with a missing children list. Staff estimate over 30 missing children are found each year using this type of comparison.
Staff manually perform the comparisons due to system compatibility problems.
As a result, the staff estimate they are able to check less than half of the names received each year from the school districts. Therefore, some missing children may not be identified. The Bureau may be able to use data provided by the school districts to the Colorado Department of Education to run comparisons electronically with the missing children's database. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation should work with the Colorado Department of Education to improve the missing children location program by developing and implementing a system that enables all names of new and transferred children to be compared with the missing children database in a timely manner. We are working with the Department of Education to take advantage of its new centralized system, which will not be fully implemented until 1999.