Results tagged “audit”

Thousands of rape kits still remain untested, finds a follow-up to a year-old audit that revealed some 7,500 rape kits sat untested on the shelves of LAPD labs. City Controller Wendy Greuel plans to release the the full findings tomorrow morning. Her office said today that the backlog has been reduced to 65%. However, Greuel says the Department’s record keeping is inconsistent, making it difficult to give entirely accurate numbers. In early October, it was reported that 3,157 kits were left to go with the full backlog completion due in the summer of 2011.

In her first audit since taking office as City Controller, Wendy Greuel this morning released findings about waste within the Los Angeles Convention Center. There's nothing catastrophic revealed in the audit, but it points out too many examples of lax oversight that cost taxpayers money.

City Controller Wendy Greuel's first audit, to be released tomorrow morning, will focus in on the city's convention center, which is said to have a $1 billion impact on the region each year. Former Controller Laura Chick, now keeping an eye on stimulus money spending statewide, always found the most ridiculous wasteful spending practices around city hall, garnering major headlines almost every time an audit was released. It will be interesting to see Greuel's results, but all signs point towards some solid findings. In a media advisory, her office hints towards opportunities to make things more efficient not taken by leadership, a lack of policy on fee waivers and lack of oversight on employee overtime, including one employee who made nearly twice their annual salary in overtime.

Just a week on the job and City Controller Wendy Greuel is kicking butt. The city's Emergency Management Department was charged with feeding some 3,200 officers that were deployed for the Michael Jackson memorial service in case the crowds outside the Staples Center grew, possibly to a million people.

In her inaugural speech as the City Controller, Wendy Greuel vowed to continue former Controller Laura Chick's quest to legally audit--financially or performance-wise--the offices of the Mayor, City Attorney and City Councilmembmers. Chick had tried to audit former City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's office, but he balked and the matter went to court where Chick lost. “If there is any question about this, I shall take this issue to you, the voters of the city of Los Angeles,” Greuel said yesterday. If you follow city politics, answer this question: if she fills the role just like Laura Chick did for the past eight years, will we be soon calling her Mayor Greuel?

The County of Los Angeles has gone ahead and busted themselves. "This is government at its worst," Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky was quoted saying in the LA Times. "We have a problem, no question about it. But we are going to move quickly to fix it." The county started auditing themselves after they found over 300 unused lines at the now-closed Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital. The $1.5 million number only totals what they've discovered so far and it could double when they finish with 16,000 useless lines. Any savings is good news, especially in this economy, but the County has a long way to go. The $22.8 billion budget has department heads trying to cut as much as 13%.

$150 million in voter approved money toward animal shelters was the subject of the latest audit by City Controller Laura Chick today. Her letter to the Mayor and City Council wasn't as scathing as other audits (think about LAPD's rape-kit backlog audit), but she did reveal some problems:

"This is not the way it's supposed to work in LA nowadays," an unnamed source tells former Daily News Editor Ron Kaye, who broke the news that Nick Patsaouras, president of the DWP Board of Commissioners, will be running for City Controller. Considered a shoe-in for the job, Councilmember Wendy Greuel has already raised nearly $700,000 for her Office of the Controller campaign, according to the latest candidate filings. The Controller's Office is city's watchdog on spending and operations, however it has no power to enforce findings in audits. As important as the job is, it's also not a popular one with other councilmembers and city staff.

City Controller Laura Chick announced yesterday the results of an audit ordered on the construction of the 10-story police headquarters downtown, revealing that the costs on the project "have soared $150 million over projections" bringing the receipt to over $453 million, according to the Daily News.