In these unfortunate times of misinformation, it would be nice to be able to rely on our state government to provide us with accurate statistics, especially when it comes to how our tax dollars are spent.
But unfortunately that’s not always the case. A recent state audit found that a report issued by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts regarding thousands of vehicles used by state agencies was riddled with “inaccurate and unreliable” information.
The mistakes in the comptroller’s State of the Fleet 2023 report ranged from sloppy oversights to downright absurdity. The report would be comical if we weren’t talking about an official state document.
For example, the fleet report said that 33 state vehicles logged a total of 20.8 million miles in fiscal year 2022, or an average of 629,000 miles per vehicle, with one of those logging more than 2 million miles alone, according to the September audit.
In another section, the report said that 52 state vehicles had a combined fuel cost of $9.5 million that same year, or about $183,000 per vehicle. More than $660,000 was attributed to just one vehicle that had supposedly logged only 10,000 miles that year.
Many other obviously ludicrous mistakes made it into the report, the audit found. For example, nearly 500 vehicles had inservice dates that were actually before the time they were acquired by the state. Nearly 600 vehicles had disposition dates of Jan. 1, 1900.
A spokesperson for the comptroller’s office pointed us to management’s acknowledgement of the auditor’s findings and commitment to make necessary changes. “We have established an external data review team and completed documentation of all policies and procedures, on or ahead of schedule, which is noted in the report,” spokesman Kevin Lyons said in an email.
We can’t help but wonder why such data review procedures weren’t already in place. The Texas Legislature in 1999 directed the comptroller to adopt a statewide fleet management plan “to improve the administration and operation of the state’s vehicle fleet.” To comply with the new law, the comptroller developed the Fleet System, a centralized repository of data including complete vehicle inventory and calculations on average costs of operations.
According to the audit, all state agencies were required to use that system. But the Legislature in 2021 exempted the departments of criminal justice, public safety, transportation and parks and wildlife. That left 96 agencies required to report data on roughly 13,000 state vehicles, or about 40% of all state-owned vehicles.
This report should have been a dry assessment on basic government functioning. Instead it was a debacle. How can state lawmakers make good decisions on whether agencies are wisely managing their assets if they don’t have accurate information about simple facts?
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