S&WB failed to make needed changes, OIG says

A new report by the New Orleans Office of the Inspector General (OIG) says that the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board has a lot of room for improvement. The report, “Sanitation Fees Collected by the Sewerage and Water Board — Follow-Up Report,” was released last week and listed several key improvements that need to be made to the way the city agency conducts business.

According to the report, OIG auditors conducted the follow-up to determine the extent to which the City and the S&WB implemented OIG recommendations from its 2013 report. The original report found $8.5 million in unpaid sanitation fees and that neither sanitation nor water services were discontinued for customers who did not pay their sanitation bill.

In June 2014 the City authorized the termination of water service for customers with delinquent sanitation fees. However, auditors found that the City did not instruct the S&WB to terminate water services for customers with $7 million in delinquent sanitation fees in 2014.

In the original report, auditors also found that the City did not effective review adjustments to sanitation fees to determine whether they were valid. This practice continued: The City issued $1.4 million in sanitation adjustments in 2014 but still lacked effective controls to mitigate the risk of fraud and errors.

“The amount of uncollected sanitation fees decreased from $8.5 million to $7 million between 2011 and 2014,” Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux, said last week. “But the City failed to exercise its authority to shut off water for non-payment of fees or to improve control over the issuance fee adjustments totaling $1.4 million.”

This article originally published in the August 15, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.