Audit finds series of failures in Richmond's finance department
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The city of Richmond finance department failed to respond to around 7,000 emails, six months' worth of voicemails and eight months of 311 requests, including 3,400 car tax questions, WTVR's Tyler Layne reports off a new audit.
Why it matters: City leadership is applauding the findings from the scathing draft audit, which Layne obtained through a public records request.
The big picture: The audit was compiled by third-party government finance consultant Anne Seward. The city contracted Seward in March to review the finance department in response to restaurant owners who say they had been assessed tens of thousands of dollars in questionable fees, Layne reports.
- The audit covered March through August of this year.
- Seward is being paid $200 an hour and thus far has billed the city $130,000 for her work. She's contracted through December and will make final recommendations then.
Zoom in: In addition to thousands of unanswered messages, Seward found:
- 1,000 unprocessed and unorganized business documents;
- 716 unprocessed car tax records in a box under a desk;
- Two years of business and vehicle tax bills that were never mailed, billed late or assigned the wrong date;
- Seven years of unprocessed DMV personal property records.
She also found that staffers listened to earbuds, talked on the phone and ate while working the front counter. Some took unauthorized breaks, wore sweatpants to work, closed 311 tickets without processing them, spoke unprofessionally to customers and slept on the job.
- "Attitudes and drama quotient very high in business unit," the audit noted of staffers in that portion of the department.
- Many frontline staffers also lacked proper training and were managed by middle managers who made "poor staff recruitment and promotions" decisions.
What the city is saying: "This is exactly the results from the consultant we wanted to see. ... i.e., diagnosing the problem, getting to the root cause of the problems etc.," city spokesperson Gianni Snidle tells Axios.
- Snidle noted that finance director Sheila White, who took over the role in May 2021 and helped bring Seward in, presented most of the findings to city council earlier this month along with concrete solutions either already implemented or in the works.
Mayor Stoney said in a statement: "I am proud of Sheila White and my administration [for] bringing in Anne Seward, who worked on the floor of the finance desk every day to diagnose the root problems of the finance department and institute the fix."
- "We aren't perfect, and we have made mistakes, but we are fixing them and leaving this department and City Hall better than when we found it."
Among the issues already fixed, per White's presentation: departmental restructuring, multiple staffers were fired, enhanced training for all employees, clearing the customer service backlog and implementing tracking for new requests and director approval of all new hires.
What we're watching: For the department to fully implement the rest of Seward's recommendations from the draft audit, plus the hiring and onboarding for nine new supervisory positions White identified.
Go deeper with Layne's full story.