PROVIDENCE — The state police have launched their own Department of Transportation inquiry, while allegations of altered payroll records by one of the better-known engineering firms working for the state agency have come to light.

The state police are now reviewing the preliminary findings of the task force that Governor Carcieri assembled last month to look into DOT spending and contracting — and then halted.

In an interview Thursday, Capt. Stephen J. Lynch said he and members of the state police financial-crimes and public-corruption unit, headed by Brian K. Casilli, met for nearly two hours that morning with members of the short-lived task force headed by the chief of the Department of Administration’s Bureau of Audits, H. Christopher DerVartanian.

It remains unclear how much progress DerVartanian’s team actually made in the weeks before Carcieri, on June 15, ordered them to stop work and hand over their findings to the state police with this explanation from Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal: “The governor’s goal was to bring a higher level of scrutiny to the DOT contract situation than the initially created review team could provide. He also wanted to ensure that nothing was done that might potentially undermine any future criminal investigation.”

DerVartanian provided an insight into how abruptly his team’s work was stopped. In an interview early this week, he mentioned a finding by one member of the team, state banking division examiner Jeff Asermely, that some DOT contractors were continuing to charge higher overhead rates than DOT auditors had determined they were entitled to charge.

But after repeated inquiries, he acknowledged two days later that Asermely had not documented his findings in writing and did not recall the names of the companies.

Despite this somewhat muddy start, Lynch said the state police have asked several members of DerVartanian’s team to “continue their work in working with us to further this investigation.” Lynch then clarified his use of the word investigation, saying what was under way was more of “a review to see if there is any criminality in the activities at DOT … our job is to sift [through] what is criminal and what is administrative.”

Meanwhile, new questions came to light this week about the DOT’s handling of a finding by one of its own in-house auditors of altered payroll reports in which the DOT’s name was allegedly written in over the “whited-out” — but still easily read — name of another client of a prominent engineering firm.

Retired DOT auditor Elizabeth Swartz said the company also claimed to have lost all its 1993 payroll records, which compounded the difficulty of verifying contract billings.

The DOT has not yet responded to inquiries about the incident, though spokeswoman Dana Alexander Nolfe provided this response from DOT Director Jerome F. Williams on Thursday: “I have not had an opportunity to review the questions [The Providence Journal] sent us … but I will try to get to it tomorrow.” There has been no further response.

But Swartz yesterday said that responsibility for this particular contract audit was taken away from her and reassigned after she brought her findings to the attention of her superiors at the state transportation agency at some point between 2002-03.

Swartz, who retired in January, said the office manager at the company assured her: “The charges weren’t double-billed.” But the payrolls were “changed so blatantly, it seemed like they figured they were above the law. They could do whatever they wanted to do.”

“I was just taken off with no explanation whatsoever,” she said.

This arm of the consulting industry is represented locally by the Rhode Island Consulting Engineers, which just recently hired a $4,000-a-month public-relations spokesman to agitate for a shift in DOT auditing practices.

Spokesman Michael Doyle said the DOT audit division is so backed up that some companies — he cited Beta Engineering, as an example — have not had an overhead rate adjustment for 10 years.

Seeking faster increases in the “overhead” rates they are allowed to charge for their non-labor expenses, such as rent, utilities, travel expenses and professional fees, the group wants the DOT to rely in the future on audits performed by their own CPAs, rather than the department’s in-house auditors.

In an interview and a statement issued earlier this week, Williams seemed inclined to take the suggestion, saying: “We want to make sure that the department does audits on time, and we are looking into this issue.” (Asked on Thursday whether the group had also made its case to governor and his staff, Carcieri spokesman Neal had no immediate answer.)

In related development, the story about the iconic $102,858 typist that sparked the investigations and controversy surrounding the department took on several new twists.

By replacing nine of the staffers the private consulting firm, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, was providing the DOT for its traffic-monitoring center with four new full-time state workers — and expanding the duties of seven dispatchers in another division to include the traffic center, DOT chief of staff Chuck Alves projected $498,000 in savings. (He did not, however, produce a promised breakdown of these anticipated savings.)

As of March, VHB was billing the state agency for more than 30 staffers at rates that included overhead (145.99 percent) and “profit” (10 percent). At $18.35 an hour, the now-infamous clerk-typist made the equivalent of $38,181 a year; the remaining $64,690 went to VHB.

VHB spokesman Kevin Gould this week confirmed reports that VHB had offered to charge the DOT a lower “field rate” of 134.36 percent for staffing the traffic center — plus reimbursement for specific items, such as local travel and printing — “because we felt it more equitably accounted for costs for the project.”

The offer was rejected, he said, because DOT “requires a single overhead rate for consulting firms.”

kgregg@projo.com