Newest articles on The Sacramento Press tagged as "efficiency"

City Finance Division audit finds lost revenue potential

2011-08-18T01:39:21Z

Is the city of Sacramento losing out on an opportunity to bring in more revenue? According to the most recent city audit, the answer is yes.

In a report to the City Council Tuesday, City Auditor Jorge Oseguera outlined four areas for needed improvement in the Revenue Collections department of the city’s Finance Division, along with 12 recommendations for remedying the problem areas.

The audit, which was started in late November 2010, found that the city could improve its cash handling procedures, that the performance measures for Revenue Division management lack efficiency and the process for collecting transfer tax revenue is inefficient.

“(The Finance Department) does have good practices in place as far as safeguarding the city’s assets,” Oseguera said Tuesday. “We’d like to see better-documented procedures so we can be more in line with the city’s expectations.”

The fourth area that city auditing staff focused on was the Transient Occupancy Tax process, and this is where a large potential for increased city revenue was found.

Transient occupancy tax (TOT) is charged by hotel operators on hotel guests who stay for less than 30 days in a room. The tax is charged at a rate of 12 percent of the room charge, according to the audit report.

Hotel guests generally pay the tax directly to the hotel operator when paying the room charge. The operator then remits the full amount of the TOT collected each month to the city.

According to the audit, nearly $17 million in TOT revenue was collected in fiscal year 2009-10, representing 6.5 percent of city tax revenue and 2.1 percent of total city revenue.

Despite TOT being such a large source of city revenue with clearly outlined penalties for nonpayment or fraud, the audit reports, this revenue has not been audited since fiscal year 1996-97.

Instead, the city relies solely on hotels’ calculations of the TOT due.

With hotel operators self-reporting the TOT they charge to hotel guests and sending the amount collected to the city, it is possible that a hotel may be operating and not remit TOT collected to the city, or that a hotel could charge unsuspecting guests the TOT and retain the additional revenue, the audit states.

The audit findings recommend auditing the TOT process to better identify potential revenue increases from applying city code as it’s written – including penalties for late payments and interest on underpayments.

The city’s last audit of the TOT process was 15 years ago, Oseguera said, and in the year following that audit, the city saw an increase in overall tax collected of more than 20 percent.

According to projections in the revenue collections audit, a TOT audit would cost approximately $83,000 – but it could mean as much as a $2.4 million increase in annual city revenues if the results are similar to those following the last audit in 1997.

According to the report, an audit of TOT revenue was attempted in 2003, but the auditing firm raised concerns about confusion between the TOT policy and city code and the audit was stopped. Since then, the TOT policy has been updated.

Councilman Steve Cohn, chairman of the city Auditing Committee, said Tuesday that the recommendations in the recent audit report are items the city should definitely follow up on – especially the collection of hotel taxes.

“(That one) could be a big-money item,” Cohn said, “so we really need to follow up quickly.”

In a response letter to the city auditor, Leyne Milstein, finance director of the city Finance Division, said she agreed with the findings of the revenue collections audit report.

Milstein wrote that she was “very pleased” with the “professional efforts” of the city auditor and his staff.

Milstein said the work on a TOT audit is scheduled to start this summer and that, although there are mechanisms in place to adequately enforce the uniform TOT per city code, the division will take steps to document the process and keep it up to date for further review by the audit department.

Oseguera said the Revenue Division has already requested the firm Muni Services to do the TOT audit. Muni Services currently has a contract with the city to provide other analyses, Oseguera said, so this audit would fall under that contract.

Although there is not yet an established timeframe for completing a review and audit of the TOT process, Oseguera said he will include it as part of the followup process that he has for all of the city’s audits.

Oseguera said he follows up every six months with audited departments to evaluate how staff went about applying any recommendations.

“We do (the followup) to ensure that none of (the recommendations) get shelved,” Oseguera said. “We continue to report back on (them) until the risks that we identified and the remedies we recommended have been fully implemented.”

The city auditor is tasked with completing three to four audits per year, and the revenue collections audit was the third and final one in the 2010-11 fiscal year.

City audits are scheduled every year during the budget process, Cohn said, and the next audits scheduled include reviews of fire inspection fees, city-wide supplemental pay, city sidewalk repair process and a 3-1-1 call center audit.

Additionally, Cohn said Oseguera and his staff are working with an outside firm to review the city’s golf course maintenance.

Cohn said council members hope to have that audit completed by the end of 2011 so a decision could be made on contracting out golf course maintenance by the middle of 2012.

Mayor Kevin Johnson said at his weekly press conference Tuesday that he has been supportive of the audit process since he came into office, and he’s pleased to see the work Oseguera and his staff are doing.

“I felt there was waste and fraud and abuse and inefficiencies and things we could do to consolidate,” Johnson said. “We are finally at that point where we’re auditing different (city) departments and every month bringing one forward.”

Johnson said the next step for the council after reviewing the audit is to act on the recommendations as soon as possible.

“For us, you gotta find ways to do more with less, especially in a down economy,” Johnson said. “There’s certain things we can do to consolidate our effort that make us smarter and more efficient and cost-effective.”

Cohn agreed, saying he thinks the audits offer good insight into the efficiency of city government and how it handles practices and procedures.

“Generally, the audits point out things that really need to be done,” Cohn agreed. “We see how we can get additional revenues or reduce costs in the (auditor’s) suggestions. It’s good housekeeping.”

Cohn added that the Audit Department is “very professional” and the fact that it is doing these audits will “make staff a little more on their toes.”

Read the Revenue Collection Audit here.

Melissa Corker is a Staff Reporter for The Sacramento Press. Follw her on Twitter @MelissaCorker.

Parkour traces Sacramento

2009-08-20T06:44:13Z

I walked onto the quad of Bella Vista High School on a Sunday afternoon to a sight of 20 or so men climbing walls, running like cheetahs on all fours and swinging from trees.

This was the Sacramento regional parkour practice, led by a SFparkour.com representative, Victor Lo Forte. He has been a practitioner of parkour, or traceur, French for tracer, for three and a half years and has led the Sacramento group for about two years.

"From what I understand, it's basically the discipline of training one's mind and body to prepare oneself to overcome obstacles in an environment," Lo Forte said.

Parkour is said to be rooted in early 20th century French military practices. Georges Hébert, a World War I naval officer, developed a notion of physicality that embraced use of the body and its environment for developing strength useful to society.

These principles were the foundation for his "Natural Method," which incorporated the fusion of the mental and physical to overcome obstacles via climbing, running and jumping (to name a few). His method contributed to the development of the French parcours du combattant, or military obstacle course.

As a young teen, David Belle, considered the father of parkour, picked up Natural Method ethics along with his gymnastic and martial arts training in France.

Many of the young men at the Sacramento parkour practice admire Belle and have adopted the Natural Method as part of their training.

"Parkour is training your flight response," said Sacramento State student Jake Anderson.

Lo Forte commented on one of the many purposes of parkour, to "be strong to protect your family and friends."

"We’re not trying to hurt anybody, we’re training to be strong, and that really helps the community," he said.

Though not a spectator sport, it is difficult to explain what exactly traceurs are doing to people who gather round their concrete playground.

"I usually point them to YouTube and Casino Royale," Anderson said. "I tell them parkour is the study of the most efficient way to get from point A to point B."

This efficiency calls for climbing walls, not walking around them.

"If you're in a dead-end alley, you look back and forth and don’t look up," Anderson said. "People don’t look up, they don’t look at their environments anymore."

He described parkour as a way to think of our built environment with a critical lens. "We create our environments to be quick and easy for what we’re raised as," Anderson said. "Parkour shows us that there are actually easier ways than we’re raised, things people don’t think of."

The Sacramento traceurs have tried practicing in the Downtown Sacramento area, but have found security and business owners to be hostile to the activity. "If they tell us to leave then we leave," Lo Forte said.

"I’d say ground-rules for anywhere are be respectful of the environment, don’t wreck things, don’t leave litter behind, clean up after yourselves," he said. "There is a big thing in parkour community called the leave no trace campaign. We don’t want it to look like we’ve been there. We don’t want to get kicked out of places."

Parkour training also focuses on overall health and well-being. "It might save their lives," Lo Forte said. "You never know if they might get addicted to drugs or end up in jail."

"I wanted to get in shape," said Robert King, a telecommunications technician for Sacramento County. "Since I started in January, I lost 40 pounds."

"A lot of people are sitting home and they don’t get any sensory input; they don't smell the dirt on their hands and the sun on their face," Lo Forte said.

This was the case for 15-year-old Jonah Saysourivong. "Before this I was a big-time gamer and would play Call of Duty for 42 hours straight," he said. "I definitely know other kids my age are drinking alcohol and smoking, and that’s one thing I’d never do."

The health benefits and the body's adaptation to unique movements is of great interest to Anderson as a kinesiology student. "They should talk about it in anatomy classes and in physical therapy classes. I think that doctors should know it, gymnasts, athletes," he said. He hopes to introduce parkour in his dance and martial arts classes at Sacramento State.

Lo Forte also aspires to introduce parkour skills to the police force. "These things will be helpful for them and hopefully they will realize that and hire some of us to train them in the future," he said.

In the middle of practice, a group of young men started tumbling and performing a series of flips in the air and over others lying on the ground. The freedom of movement in a creative way like this is called free-running, often associated with parkour.

"Parkour is strictly what's the most efficient way from one point to another; free-running is adding flair and flips," Anderson said.

Though there were not any females present at the practice, they are encouraged to participate as traceuse, French for female tracers.

Robert King encouraged me to try a technique to get over a 7-foot wall during practice, but I settled for swinging and balancing on rails on my own time. I found that I was using my environment rather than living around it. Though we all live in our environments, traceurs live their environments.

For more information, click the following link:

Practice at Bella Vista High School, meeting Sundays and Wednesdays at 4 p.m.