Denver Auditor Dennis Gallagher criticized the city for lax oversight of the cars that hundreds of city employees take home.
“This is really intolerable,” Gallagher said in a release accompanying a two-year audit. “There is no accountability required for many of the people who have the benefit of taking these vehicles home.
“And with the price of gas going through the roof, it is more than appropriate that employees reimburse the city for their personal use of the vehicle and gas. It is not up to the taxpayers to subsidize that use.”
The audit said 81 percent of the employees examined from January 2002 to December 2004 failed to make one or more commuter reimbursements to the city.
The violations would have totaled more than $747,000 in money that should have been either reimbursed to the city or taxed as income by the Internal Revenue Service, according to the audit.
City officials took issue with the auditor’s findings, citing – among other things – that the majority of the city’s take-home fleet is made up of police cars. Those are exempt from commuter reimbursements.
Gallagher spokesman Dennis Berckefeldt said the audit looked only at cars that are not used by the Police Department.
Denver finance director Margaret Browne said there are places where the city can improve its oversight, but she said the auditor’s recommendations were not cost effective.
“We don’t need to create a whole new office to control 400-some-odd take-home vehicles,” she said, noting that 60 percent of the city’s fleet are police vehicles that are exempt. “Frankly, this is a little alarmist.”
City employees are allowed to take vehicles home if at least 12 times a year they have to respond to some kind of emergency. Other than that, trips to and from work have to be either reimbursed to the city or counted as income.
Of the 486 “take-home” vehicles the city had in 2005, 290 were for police, according to Browne.
Berckefeldt said the auditor’s office is calling for a citywide rule to combat the problem.
“There is some concern that there could be an abuse of the system,” he said, “that there could be people taking them home who really don’t need to – as a perk.”
Gallagher also chastised Browne for delaying implementation of a rule “that would have addressed some of the findings in this audit.”
Staff writer George Merritt can be reached at 303-820-1657 or gmerritt@denverpost.com.
