Emily Lloyd resigned as Environmental Protection commissioner in November 2008, but the city kept paying $153.76 in recurring monthly charges for four mobile phones assigned to her until July 2011.
That’s $4,920.32 that taxpayers shelled out for mobile devices that sat unused for 32 months.
Don’t blame Lloyd. She didn’t do anything wrong. Someone at her agency who should’ve been monitoring cellphone usage messed up, a troubling sign in a city where tens of thousands of city employees carry government-issued wireless equipment.
A spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection said it frequently recycles phones that are turned in but conceded that Lloyd’s came to the agency’s attention only when there was “little or no usage.”
The phone flap surfaced during an audit conducted by Comptroller John Liu of the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications, which handles procurement and billing of hand-held communications for 72 agencies.
Liu’s auditors charged that the DOITT was doing a lousy job of monitoring 31,113 devices that rang up bills of $14.7 million in fiscal 2011.
As evidence, they cited about 10,000 cases in which a device wasn’t matched to a specific user. As a result, the audit said $1.2 million might have been wasted between April and June 2011 alone on underused or redundant equipment.
“In an age of smart phones, this is clearly dumb policy,” Liu said.
The DOITT pushed back hard.
For one thing, the agency said, its authority is limited and it can’t tell other agencies what to do. Nevertheless, going “over and beyond its duty,” the DOITT said it has been uncovering savings of about $150,000 a month by weeding out unnecessary equipment and overcharges.
“We are disappointed with the poor quality of this audit report, which took more than 16 months to complete yet still displayed a staggering misunderstanding of the facts,” said agency spokesman Nick Sbordone.
An aide to the comptroller agreed that agencies, need some redundancy.