Sanitation Bureau Agrees to New Measures to Curb Fraud

The Los Angeles Board of Public Works agreed Friday to produce quarterly financial reports on its troubled Bureau of Sanitation and submit the huge trash collection agency to a second review to ensure that severe financial irregularities discovered in a recent audit have been corrected.

The reports and a second audit of the $170-million-a-year bureau were recommended by City Controller Rick Tuttle, who told the five-member board at a meeting Friday that the mismanagement and widespread fraud uncovered in the first audit were “the most serious sets of problems” his office had encountered in years.

The bureau is among several agencies the board oversees.

“Currently, as far as we are concerned, the Bureau of Sanitation is under audit watch,” Tuttle told the panel. “Very specifically what we mean . . . is we expect there to be very active monitoring of problems which have been identified.”

Tuttle was before the board, he told its members, to “imprint on the institutional memory” of its staff “that there is a kind of diligence that must be maintained in terms of expenditure of public funds.”

Last week, the controller made public an audit of the Bureau of Sanitation that found irregularities in eight of its 18 divisions, including evidence of falsifying overtime claims, padding of time sheets and doctoring of payroll records.

Auditors were unable to gauge the full cost of the abuse, but noted that a sample of $687,000 in overtime payouts showed that 22% of those charges were unauthorized or undocumented.

Tuttle told the board that the audit, conducted months ago, was made public only after his office discovered that its recommendations for reform had not been instituted.

Board President Felicia A. Marcus assured him that she and other panel members got his message.

“We all take it very, very seriously and we want to have these (reform) procedures in place,” she said. The board is to respond to the audit within 30 days.

Jim Armstrong, a member of Tuttle’s staff, said the second audit will probably be conducted this year or next, depending upon the progress its managers are making.