OIG report cites poor management at S&WB of take-home cars
2nd November 2015 · 0 Comments
The New Orleans Office of Inspector General (OIG) on Wednesday released a report titled “Sewerage & Water Board Take-Home Vehicles” that shed light on the system used to assign cars to S&WB employees that live outside of Orleans Parish and the financial toll it takes on the city’s taxpayers and the S&WB budget. OIG investigators found a lack of oversight exposed the S&WB to potential fraud, waste and abuse. Investigators also discovered several examples of the S&WB violating its policies for take-home vehicles. Take-home vehicles are assigned for the sole purpose of responding to emergencies after normal duty hours, but almost half of the employees assigned vehicles lived outside of Orleans Parish. However, instead of putting controls in place to strengthen oversight, the S&WB either did not enforce its policies or eliminated them altogether.
The decision to provide S&WB employees with take-home car privileges resulted in additional costs for fuel and maintenance. In 2014 the S&WB spent approximately $394,000 for its 110 take-home cars, but OIG investigators found that the S&WB failed to take several basic steps to ensure that take-home vehicle privileges were necessary and cost effective. For example, the S&WB:
• Did not establish a response time requirement during emergency events;
• Eliminated the requirement for employees to respond to at least four emergencies per month to qualify for take-home vehicle privileges’
• Expanded the allowable commuting distance for employees with take-home vehicles and
• Eliminated the requirement that all take-home vehicle assignments be subject to review and written approval by the S&WB Vehicle Committee.
The S&WB vehicle policy required that all take-home vehicle assignments had to be reviewed by the S&WB Vehicle Committee. Each take-home vehicle recommendation form had to be approved and signed by the Safety Committee Chairman. However, the S&WB did not adhere to the policy because the Safety Committee Chairman did not sign 104 out of 105 forms provided to the OIG. The only form that included a signature was completed by the Safety Committee Chairman himself. On March 15, 2015, the S&WB revised its vehicle policy and eliminated the requirements that forms must be completed by employees, approved by the vehicle committee, and signed by the Safety Committee Chairman.
According to senior S&WB officials, employees are assigned take-home vehicles in order to respond directly to emergencies after normal duty hours. However, the S&WB was unable to provide an accurate count of how many times their employees responded to after-hours emergencies because the S&WB does not have a system in place to monitor and review vehicle usage. Although each vehicle is equipped with a Global Positioning System (GPS) unit, senior S&WB officials do not use GPS to track the vehicles on a daily basis.
Because the usage of S&WB vehicles isn’t monitored or tracked, there’s no way to know how the cars are being used, and the Office of Inspector General has reportedly received a number of complaints alleging that these cars are being utilized for personal use.
That personal use represents a drain on the S&WB’s budget and an unnecessary burden on New Orleans taxpayers.
According to the report, the decision to provide S&WB employees with take-home car privileges resulted in higher than necessary fuel and maintenance costs. In 2014 the S&WB spent approximately $322,128 on fuel for 110 take-home vehicles. Eight of the top 10 employees with the highest estimated annual fuel expenditures lived within the New Orleans metropolitan area. However, the OIG said it could not determine if these employees used the vehicles for travel in violation of the vehicle policy since the S&WB did not use any system to monitor and/or review vehicle usage.
The OIG also requested information about maintenance costs for the take-home vehicle fleet and were provided with the cost of parts for 86 vehicles. According to this information, the S&WB spent approximately $72,260, or an average of $657 per take-home vehicle, on repairs and maintenance in 2014. To reduce costs associated with take-home cars, the S&WB created a program in which employees parked the vehicles overnight at S&WB facilities located between the employees’ residences and their work locations. This program was put into place during July 2014 and was referred to as “Ready Immediate Access Vehicle.”
However, the S&WB did not follow through to ensure that employees complied with the program’s requirements. Nine S&WB employees interviewed by investigators did not participate in the program or did not know it existed. In addition, the S&WB did not verify that the immediate access vehicles were being parked at the aforementioned facilities overnight instead of at the employees’ residences. The S&WB did not have any controls in place such as a logbook or a sign-in/out sheet to determine if a vehicle was parked overnight at the facility.
Supervisors did not perform random checks at the facilities nor did S&WB management check the GPS system to determine compliance.
The take-home vehicle report follows another OIG report earlier this year that highlighted the Sewerage & Water Board’s poor management of overtime pay. IG Ed Quatrevaux said that in 2013 the Sewerage & Water Board spent more than $9 million in overtime pay, representing more than double the amount budgeted.
Over the past few years, the City of New Orleans has imposed incremental increases in S&WB rates to pay for upgrades to the city’s antiquated water system.
“This is the second report we’ve issued in the past few months that shows the Sewerage and Water Board has thrown out rules to prevent waste instead of enforcing them,” Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux said in a statement Wednesday. “The failure to control expenses results in less dollars for improving service to its customers.”
This article originally published in the November 2, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
