The county animal shelter (Orange County Animal Care) published statistics for each quarter of 2024 and for the year as a whole, but the numbers don’t add up. Does the shelter treat dogs and cats like random widgets, casually tossed into the wrong bin?  

The county has, in the past, abruptly deleted its statistics, so I copied and preserved them here. The shelter’s quarterly and annual reports are tables of “intakes” (animals coming into the shelter) and “outcomes” (animals leaving the shelter, alive or dead).

This should be straightforward.  The calendar year 2024 has four quarters: Q1 is January-March, Q2 is April-June, etc. The statistics of these quarters should add up to the totals in the annual report.  Just like a company’s quarterly sales or profits should add up to the annual numbers. 

Take a look at the header figure.  We’re looking at the very first category in the shelter’s statistics, adult stray dogs coming in.  They don’t add up.  The four calendar quarters add up to 2,783, but the annual report shows only 2,648.  That means 135 stray dogs disappeared from the annual report. 

It doesn’t get any better on other lines of the shelter’s statistics.  Let’s look at the number of adult dogs that went to a foster home (line N in the shelter’s tables).  The quarterly numbers are 40 + 42 + 131 + 24, which gives 237.  But OC Animal Care reported 355 in its annual table. So, which is it, 237 or 355? These are living, breathing animals, not widgets you might forget in the wrong bin. 

This happened before. OC Animal Care is unable to keep track of its animals, reported a community member in 2023. The county deleted its statistics and took a long time to replace them.

If a company published earnings statements with these kinds of errors, its investors would dump it in a hurry.

The same shelter database also gathers data for billing the OC cities that have a contract with the shelter.   It’s supposed to track which city each animal came from, and split the costs based on each city’s share of the shelter stays.  

But the billing worksheets oddly show cities outside its service area. 

Look at the shelter’s table for Fiscal Year 2024-2025.  The table has numbers for Irvine, Garden Grove, Laguna Woods, and several other cities that don’t get service from the county.  How is this even possible? The county is clearly mis-allocating the animals.

If OC Animal Care is simply disregarding these entries and allocating costs using the remaining numbers, its calculation is still flawed.  We know that the Irvine number should be zero, rather than 888.  We know that Laguna Woods should be zero, not 263, and so on.  The numbers that landed on Irvine and Laguna Woods are incorrect entries that should have landed on another city.  If the procedure is incorrect, all the numbers are wrong, not just the glaring ones.

Michelle Aguirre, the county CEO, ran the county’s Finance department.  Does this meet her accounting standards?  If a calculation is wrong, would she use part of it regardless, or go back and fix the root cause?  All the billing calculations need to be revised.  

Visit OCShelter.com for more information on OC Animal Care and how to contact the cities that contract with this county shelter. 

Michael Mavrovouniotis retired from a career in academia and quantitative investment management.  He is now a volunteer data scientist for the non-profit organizations Social Compassion and SCIL (socialcompassion.org).  The opinions expressed here are his own. 

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