PROVIDENCE — The state police have concluded their 7½ -month probe of the state’s $350-million-a-year Department of Transportation with “no findings of criminal activity,” according to state police Maj. Steven O’Donnell.

O’Donnell would not disclose the scope of the inquiry, initiated by Governor Carcieri last June after state auditors — and a series of newspaper articles — drew attention to problems within the road-building agency, including: the extension in time, scope and money of relatively small contracts that morphed into huge ones without ever being rebid; altered payroll records; alleged abuses within a federally mandated minority-hiring program; and the involvement of the DOT’s chief engineer in the award of a multimillion-dollar contract to a “step-nephew.”

After the hiring of a $102,858 typist first came to light, Carcieri assembled a task force to look into the DOT’s spending and contracting practices.

But as more details came to light, Carcieri halted the task-force inquiry and ordered the panel — led by Lottery Director and former Providence Deputy Police Chief Gerald Aubin — to “turn over to the state police and the U.S. Attorney’s office any documents related to DOT contracts.”

“Over the last few months and weeks, I have become increasingly alarmed about information being uncovered at the Rhode Island Department of Transportation,” Carcieri said at the time. “Unfortunately, the more we looked, the more we found.”

O’Donnell, responding to a newspaper inquiry yesterday, said the probe was closed several weeks ago after the state police “spent some considerable resources” reviewing allegations he would not identify. He would not elaborate except to say: “I just can tell you that our end of it is concluded…. The state police end of it is concluded, no criminal wrongdoing at this point.”

He would not say if the state police referred their findings to any other state or federal agency. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office refused to confirm or deny whether federal investigators ever had or have an investigation under way.

DOT Director Jerome Williams did not respond to a request for comment. But Carcieri spokesman Jeff Neal said: “It is not my understanding that the state police investigation is closed,” and DOT spokeswoman Dana Nolfe said: “RIDOT is unaware of the state police probe being complete.” But O’Donnell reaffirmed his earlier statements.

In recent weeks, there have been other DOT-related developments:

•The DOT confirmed that Williams is pursuing a new way of tracking contractor spending that would have the department rely on audits commissioned by the contractors themselves and more specifically the consulting engineers who lobbied for the right to present their own audits rather than wait for in-house DOT auditors to approve their requests for higher overhead rates.

Yesterday, DOT spokeswoman Heidi Cote said Williams has submitted draft rules for the new self-audit program to the federal Highway Administration for approval, and hopes to launch the approach on a pilot basis as soon as possible.

At this point, Neal said, Carcieri supports Williams’ decision to test the concept. “Requiring engineering consultants to be audited by independent, licensed certified public accounting firms may help DOT stay current with its auditing obligations. As you know, certified public accounting firms are required to report their findings accurately.”

•In his latest fundraising report, Carcieri disclosed a series of $500 and $1,000 contributions — totaling close to $20,000 — from the construction industry, including principals in several of the big road-construction companies that work for the DOT, including Cardi Construction, Aetna Bridge and J.H. Lynch, and several of the smaller minority-owned firms who work for them, such as Cosco Inc. and MON Landscaping.

Neal said the contributions stemmed from a Sept. 24 fundraiser at the Radisson Airport Hotel, paid for by the Carcieri campaign but hosted by Mike D’Ambra of the D’Ambra construction company. The report, filed late last month, covers fundraising from Sept. 1 to Dec. 31.

D’Ambra was unavailable for comment yesterday, but Neal said: “D’Ambra selected and invited all the participants.”

No law bars state officials from accepting campaign contributions from individuals connected to companies that do business with the state, but former Gov. Lincoln Almond pledged early on to refuse money from DOT contractors specifically because of alleged links in the past between DOT contracts and contributions, saying, “I just don’t want any perception problems out there.”

It could not be determined yesterday whether the close of the state police probe ends any further state and federal inquiries into the DOT.

Before their own inquiry into DOT operations was brought to a halt on June 15, the members of the task force appointed by Carcieri hit on a half-dozen “active” contracts that began small and then exploded into contracts worth as much as $64.9 million, without ever again going out to bid.

They cited, for example, a $1.3-million “safety-improvement” contract awarded to the Maguire Group in 1984 that grew, through 248 separate contract extensions and “addendums,” into a $64.9-million source of business for the company and a major role in the current Route 195 relocation. They also cited a $449,000 “bridge rehabilitation” contract awarded to Commonwealth Engineering & Consultants in 1993 that swelled, as a result of 69 “addendums,” into a $28.2-million role in replacing the Sakonnet River bridge.

The Department of Administration’s chief auditor, H. Chris DerVartanian, said that the review, though truncated, illustrated the extent to which the consultants “were driving the scope of the work with regard to the design projects.”

The review had been announced by Carcieri on May 9, after the first in a series of Providence Journal stories about the DOT, including its payment to Vanasse Hangen Brustlin the equivalent of $102,858 a year to provide a typist. The DOT was paying the company a 145.99-percent markup for “overhead” — plus a 10-percent guaranteed “profit” — to staff a traffic-monitoring center in the DOT’s state-owned building on Smith Hill.

Subsequent stories detailed the findings by a former DOT auditor of altered payroll records by Beta Engineering, one of the better-known engineering firms working for the state agency — and allegations in a lawsuit that Cardi signed up a minority-owned firm to meet hiring requirements to get a contract, and then did the work itself.

Cardi has denied the allegations. The owners of what is now the BETA Group said they knew the company had “management problems” in the mid-1990s, but were unaware that company employees working on DOT projects were billing their hours to “the wrong project” until a keen-eyed DOT auditor uncovered the problem in 2003.

During the Department of Administration’s brief foray into DOT operations, DerVartanian said the review team learned that the DOT was often late in completing required biennial audits of the expenses its contractors use to justify their “overhead rates,” and that “many” contractors continued charging their inflated rates long after they were told to stop.

When asked which companies made this their practice, DerVartanian said, “We didn’t have an opportunity to do what we might have done had we continued our work … maybe asked some more questions, and then generated a report.”

kgregg@projo.com