More than half of private crews billed Toronto for tree maintenance work when their GPS records indicated they were not at the appropriate sites, according to the city’s Auditor General.
In an investigation set to be presented to the city’s audit committee on Friday, Beverly Romeo-Beehler reports that 62 per cent of analyzed contractor work logs did not line up with the GPS records of the crews’ vehicles.
The City of Toronto pays the contractors according to the hours reported in the daily logs.
“This is a very serious breach in my view, and it has to be addressed,” Councillor Michael Thompson told CTV News Toronto. “If this is the way this group is going to act, essentially to rip the taxpayers off, I’m angry about it.”
The audit found that, in many instances, the vehicles did not stop near the tree service locations or they went instead to addresses that correlated with coffee shops and plazas. Crews spent far more time at these locations than allowed by their lunch and coffee breaks, the audit found.
In some cases, duplicate work was listed in multiple logs from the same crews or workers reported time spent in locations with no trees. The audit also found that some crews reported time spent on dead trees, including watering tree stumps.
The auditor calculated that in an eight-hour work day, the workers with questionable logs averaged only 2.8 hours a day actually working on trees.
The City of Toronto spends $20 million in private tree maintenance contracts every year and the auditor pegs the lost productivity at $2.6 million.
“If we think we somehow missed out on $2.6 million of tree maintenance, people are going to be so angry about that,” said Councillor Paula Fletcher.
The auditor could not compare the work logs of city tree maintenance crews with their locations because the vehicles are not equipped with GPS trackers.
Romeo-Beehler is recommending the city implement stronger controls and oversight to ensure it is only paying for legitimate tree maintenance work.
