11/18/2005
By: Bill Vidonic – Times Staff
The Pennsylvania auditor general’s office said Thursday that thousands of restaurants and fast-food facilities across the state were not inspected properly, but received license renewals anyway – information uncovered in an audit prompted by the 2003 hepatitis A outbreak in Beaver County.
According to Auditor General Jack Wagner, of the state’s 17,597 businesses that serve food and drinks – including restaurants, bars and retail stores – nearly 4,000 had their licenses renewed annually by the state Department of Agriculture, even though they hadn’t been inspected for at least two years.
In one instance, Wagner said, one business received a new license for six years without an inspection.

Under state law, a business must be inspected each year in order to obtain a renewal of its license to serve food. The business must pass certain guidelines, including cleanliness of the business, proper preparation of food, and prevention of insect and vermin contamination.
Several Beaver County communities have oversight of eating and drinking establishments in their communities, including Aliquippa, Ambridge, Beaver, Beaver Falls, Conway, Monaca and Rochester. The agriculture department steps in for communities that don’t have oversight.
Allegheny County has its own health department that issues licenses and performs inspections.
According to Wagner, the agriculture department, burdened with too many inspections and too few inspectors, instructed field inspectors to use their own judgment as to when to inspect restaurants and other facilities.
Because of that, Wagner said, some businesses were inspected annually, while others went 18 months to two years before they were inspected, but their licenses were still renewed annually.
Licenses, Wagner said, were issued for facilities that failed the guidelines.
The audit, conducted for the period of Jan. 1, 2002, to Dec. 31, 2004, also showed that some warning letters to establishments that weren’t complying with the law weren’t strong enough to force changes, or didn’t say how to correct deficiencies, Wagner said.
In the wake of the hepatitis A outbreak at the now-shuttered Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant in the Beaver Valley Mall in Center Township, which sickened 660 people and killed five, the auditor general’s office decided to audit how well the agriculture department was keeping up with inspections.
The cleanliness of Chi-Chi’s was not an issue in the outbreak, health officials had maintained. Instead, the hepatitis was caused by tainted green onions served at the restaurant. The agriculture department had conducted at least two inspections at Chi-Chi’s in the months before the October 2003 outbreak began and found no serious health violations.
Ivan Anderson of the state auditor general’s office said the audit doesn’t mean that overall the restaurant industry in Pennsylvania is unsafe, but that “to ensure the public trust, there has to be proper inspection.”
Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Dennis C. Wolff admitted that his department had fallen behind on inspections, and that a backlog of about 7,000 inspections had been cut by half since early October.
Wolff also added that his department is hoping that a new information-gathering system will be up and running by January. That system, Wolff said, will allow field inspectors to submit information to the department, and that information will be available through the Internet to the public.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bill Vidonic can be reached online at bvidonic@timesonline.com.