The Ohio Department of Commerce is willing to hit the pause button on the review process for medical marijuana licenses, which has come under scrutiny from state regulators.
Ohio Auditor Dave Yost recently raised concerns about what he described as a “critical flaw” in the review of medical marijuana grower applications that would have allowed application graders’ computer accounts to be hacked.
Yost said outsiders could have signed on to the state-sponsored system for grading applications and manipulated the scores that were used late last year to grant 24 licenses for large and small marijuana growers in Ohio.
In a letter to Yost’s office, the commerce department acknowledged the problem and identified at least one error in the review process after responding to a request for documents from the auditor’s office.
“Please be aware that while taking steps to respond to document requests from your audit staff, the Department on February 12, 2018 identified inadvertent data input errors in the financial data plan scoring of the cultivator applications,” according to the letter obtained by the Enquirer.
PharmaCann would have been the eighth highest-scoring applicant among the large growers if the scores were calculated correctly, the commerce department said.
Given such concerns, the commerce department offered Yost to “pause any porting of the MMCP’s process that you deem necessary,” reads the letter from commerce director Jacqueline Williams.
The commerce department is currently reviewing license applications for up to 40 medical weed processors and an undetermined number for testing laboratories.
Applications for retail dispensaries are under review by the State of Ohio Board of Pharmacy.
But the auditor’s office acknowledged in an email that it had received the letter from the commerce department and was “formulating a response.”
