As General Jack Ripper said in Dr. Strangelove, you can't fault the hole program for one screw-up, but .........

Audit finds vanpool blunders STA program lost track of amounts collected from drivers who were supposed to pay agency

Jim Camden - Staff writer

Spokane _ The Spokane Transit Authority is short some $61,000 in its vanpool program over the past three years, but state auditors believe it is the result of poor management rather than fraud or embezzlement.

STA managers failed to keep track of the miles the vans were being driven and the amounts being collected -- or in some cases, not collected -- from drivers of the vans.

"It wasn't an instance of theft," said Allina M. Johnson, an audit manager for the state. "It was a breakdown in communication on both sides ... a lack of internal controls and a lack of monitoring."

The agency is making improvements, Johnson said.

STA spokeswoman Teresa Stueckle said the agency has strengthened communications between the department that handles the money and the department that manages the vehicles.

"We just weren't doing our job," she said. "We went to the state auditor and asked for help. And it's fixed."

For the vanpool program, STA buys and maintains vans that it makes available to drivers who are supposed to be under contract. The driver rides for free and charges passengers for daily commute trips. Each month, the driver reports the mileage and occupancy rates and pays STA 45.3 cents for each mile driven.

At least, that's the way the program is supposed to work.

State auditors, asked by the STA to investigate, discovered there were no monthly billing statements for some vans, no payment records and no Rideshare reports. STA couldn't find the contracts for some drivers.

The Rideshare coordinator, Leann Telecky, later resigned under threat of firing.

Auditors tried to check the program's finances for 1999 and wrote letters to 10 vanpool drivers in the program. They received records from only one driver. The others either didn't respond or said they had no records except the payments they made to STA.

In checking the records supplied by driver Heather Brown, auditors discovered she was calculating the mileage rate at 44.53 cents per mile. She said she apparently wrote the figure incorrectly when she was told the amount.

The spreadsheet STA used to calculate Brown's mileage was inaccurate. Brown also thought she was not required to reimburse STA for the miles driven from her house to the first passenger's house.

In checking STA records for two other drivers who didn't keep detailed accounts, auditors found the transit authority charged for more miles than the drivers reported. One driver said he believed the mileage rate was 29 cents. The other thought it was 30 cents.

The manual all drivers receive says the mileage rate is 45.3 cents.

No one at STA ever questioned the differences between what was paid and what was owed, auditors said.

The driver of the van in which the uncashed checks were found did not pay STA in 1998 or 1999, and had paid only sporadically in 1997. Again, no one at the transit agency noticed.

Recovering money from individual drivers could be difficult because records were poorly kept, Johnson said.

The STA board's finance committee will study the cost of recovering the uncollected money from drivers, Stueckle said. "If it's going to cost as much as we lost to get the money back, it wouldn't make much sense," she said.

-- (craigcar@crosswinds.net), May 17, 2000

Answers

to Craig: I drive a Pierce Transit van, and I do all the paperwork, too. I carefully keep track of ALL miles driven, and I also carefully record who rode on the van and on what days. All the STA needs to do is visit Pierce Transit (PT) and find out what PT is doing.

Pierce Transit also instituted an electronic gasoline card for purchasing gasoline. When you purchase the gasoline, the software on the computer in the gas pump asks for the mileage on the van. When the mileage reaches a certain milestone (i.e., every 4000 miles), Pierce Transit automatically schedules maintenance for the van and arranges for a loaner.

People don't realize how lucky they are to have a stand-up organization like Pierce Transit. Like the rest of us, they're far from perfect, but I think they're better than most other transit agencies in our state and across the nation.

-- Matthew M. Warren (mattinsky@msn.com), May 18, 2000.

I'd certainly agree they are better than the STA, and I'm not meaning to damn them with faint praise, either.

the craigster

-- (craigcar@crosswinds.net), May 18, 2000.