Audit Shows That Procedures To Monitor Fuel Usage In City-Owned Vehicles Weren't Well Enforced.

Listen to the full audio story

Download the MP3

In a time of climbing gas prices, Los Angeles, like many other cities, spends a lot of money on city-owned vehicles -- $29,000,000 a year on gasoline, natural gas, and diesel.

City Controller Wendy Greuel at a press conference today released an audit of the city's fuel usage. The audit finds that $7,000,000 of total fuel expenditures was spent for trips that were unaccounted for. This despite having spent twelve million dollars since 1999 on a contractor to run an expensive automated tracking system.

The tracking system isn't working, the audit says, because departments haven't been using its monitoring capabilities.

"What's clear," Greuel said, "is that some city leaders and managers were asleep at the switch."

The city buys fuel in bulk, thereby keeping prices lower than on the retail market. The fuel is then dispensed at 141 City fueling stations.

The tracking system has too many loopholes that are easy to exploit, said Greuel. For instance, master fuel access cards that allow overrides of the tracking system were within easy reach of employees, although they weren't supposed to be. Those cards were used over 50,000 times during the 22-month audit period beginning in 2009.

Overrides by keypad entry were also a problem. Greuel said, "Although [keypad] overrides should only be used when all normal methods of procuring fuel have failed, they accounted for nearly $4,000,000 worth of transactions in this audit period."

Additionally, there were 94,000 cases of odometer tampering. Cars were returned with lower odometer readings than they left with, indicating possible masking of unauthorized trips.

Although the $7,000,000 of unexplained fuel usage is spread across all city departments, the audit specifically scrutinized the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Department of Recreation and Parks, the Housing Department, and the Los Angeles Convention Center in order to understand the possible reasons for such widespread inaccuracy in record-keeping. None of the departments returned calls in time for this story's deadline.

The audit does point out that the LAPD is the only city department which has regular reviews of its fuel usage, notwithstanding some irregularities discovered in the course of the audit. The audit also states that all five departments specified had seen an earlier copy of the audit, and have agreed to both its findings and its recommendations.

These include the creation of a Fuel Task Force in the General Services Department. The task force would be comprised of representatives from departmental fuel/fleet managers. It would develop cooperative solutions and guidelines to better manage fuel resources.

Also recommended are more restrictions on use of keypad functions in vehicles, including requiring employee or badge numbers to be entered whenever fueling up.

Greuel said that, at best, "department managers did a poor job of keeping records of the fuel. Worst-case scenario is that there's theft of the city's fuel resources."

The audit will be sent to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and to City Attorney Carmen Trutanich.

Greuel, a former City Councilmember, is running for Mayor in next year's race.