Civil service says fuel abuse under control

Senior civil service managers have employed strict oversight to combat the abuse of fuel usage at the government fuel depot in Grand Cayman following an auditor general’s report that highlighted the issue, the Public Accounts Committee heard Wednesday. 

Auditor General Alastair Swarbrick said he welcomed steps taken by Cayman Islands Deputy Governor Franz Manderson, who heads the civil service, to combat the misuse of the gas cards. “Since the report was issued, I have seen clear evidence of action being taken,” he said. The auditor general in June 2012 made public a report completed by the Internal Audit Unit in August 2011 that examined fuel usage by 10 government departments or statutory authorities between July 2009 and June 2010. That report was a follow-up of an earlier internal audit, completed in December 2009, that looked at five other departments or statutory authorities. These 15 entities were the highest users of fuel from the depot among the 55 government departments and agencies. 

Between the completion of the first and second phase of the report, the average monthly spend on fuel at the depot dropped from $168,576 to $129,000 a month, a decrease of 23.5 per cent and an annual saving of $475,000. However, Mr. Swarbrick said various factors could have brought about this decrease. 

Despite the decrease in fuel usage and the number of cards in circulation, the second audit showed there was a lack of “significant systemic internal control issues and there was no corporate or concerted actions across the whole of government to develop better practices for distribution of fuel”, the auditor general told members of the Public Accounts Committee. 

Mr. Swarbrick said what the auditor general’s office had hoped to see was a more corporate response to fuel management policies – as the resources of some of the smaller agencies may have made it difficult to implement some of the auditors’ recommendations – but that Deputy Governor Manderson now appeared to be taking that approach and making heads of departments within the civil service more accountable. 

Mr. Manderson said upon receiving the audit report, he wrote to the six chief officers of departments or authorities identified as being delinquent in implementing recommendations from the audit report and gave them three months to provide a draft policy and to implement tighter controls over the use of fuel cards. 

“I am pleased to say that all the departments are now compliant, including the Ministry of Health, Portfolio of Internal and External Affairs, the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of District Administration, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance. All of those agencies have now taken the necessary action to bring the departments under their remit in compliance with the auditor general’s report,” the deputy governor said. 

Of the 10 biggest consumers of fuel, the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service and Recreation, Parks and Cemeteries increased their average monthly consumption between the two phases of the internal audit, with police having a $477 monthly increase – from 21,491 to $21,968 – and the latter agency spending an additional $9 a month, from $3,228 to $3,237. Decreases were noted among the other eight departments, with the Department of Environmental Health showing the biggest monthly drop, from $48,714 a month to $37,554. 

Alan Jones, chief officer of the Ministry of District Administration, Works, Land and Agriculture, under which the Department of Environmental Health falls, said that the department had undertaken a comprehensive review and implemented a new policy on the control of fuel cards.The committee heard that as of 14 September, 2012, the number of employee cards and vehicle cards in active service was 1,102 and 846, respectively, down from 1,606 employee cards and 1,164 vehicle cards in 2009. 

The report found that 43 per cent of the 378 active employee gas cards used between July 2009 and June 2010 either belonged to individuals who were no longer employed by the department responsible for the fuel card or had no “business need for the card”. Of 97 ex-employee cards identified as still active within the 10 government entities as of July 2010, 13 of these former staff members had left before 2005. One employee with a gas card had left the Planning Department in August 2001, while another had left the Health Services Authority in November 2002. 

The committee heard that unless a head of department submits the relevant form about an individual no longer being employed, the employee remains in the GASBOY computer system, which logs usage of gas cards. The Internal Audit Unit report also identified instances in which vehicle cards were used to purchase fuel multiple times within a 24-hour period and in some cases within one hour. Mr. Jones told the committee that two fill-ups within the same hour would have been possible, for example, in the case of the Mosquito Research and Control Unit’s mosquito fogger, in which the tank of the vehicle would have been filled and then the fuel tank for the generator for the fogger machine would have been filled immediately afterward. 

The audit records showed cases in which a single gas card was used several times a day. Mr. Jones said this could explained by the fact that in some cases, departments had assigned a fuel card to a manager to control every fuel transaction. “So, on the face of it, it appeared suspicious, but in actual fact, when you drill down, it was quite a successful attempt by the relevant agencies and departments to ensure that one person was controlling it and knew every transaction,” Mr. Jones said. The Department of Vehicle and Equipment Services, which runs the depot on North Sound Road and which issues the fuel cards, operates a computerised system called GASBOY that logs fuel consumption under each gas card. Separate cards are issued for vehicles and employees, so users have to swipe both cards and enter a PIN number on a self-service gas pump before filling up their fuel tanks. 

An upgraded GASBOY system, for which a request for proposal will shortly be issued, will make more information about fuel usage among government staff available to senior managers, Mr. Jones said. The committee heard that the new system would eliminate the use of fuel cards and would use a key fob system instead. It would also enable a limit to be set on how much fuel could be bought at one time.