Audit: Revere DPW misused gas money

REVERE – City workers used an “override key” thousands of times in 2005 and 2006 to bypass a Public Works (DPW) security system and pump over 46,000 gallons of taxpayer-paid gasoline into vehicles.State Auditor Joseph DeNucci’s office red flagged the poorly regulated gas use this week and urged city officials to establish tighter controls over fuel distribution.The Auditor’s long-anticipated findings are the latest chapter in a Public Works Department probe that many city officials thought ended when the state Ethics Commission cleared water facilities foreman Joseph Maglione on Oct. 23 of conflict of interest charges.With findings by the state’s chief watchdog now public, City Councilors have a new set of questions to ask about inventory controls and policy standards for one of the city’s biggest departments.They’ve focused their concerns on 3,578 instances documented in the audit when the Gasboy security system designed to control gas use was overridden.”Although the Gasboy system’s controls were frequently overridden, DPW officials did not keep record of who overrode the system or the reasons for the system’s being overridden,” the audit stated.The audit also noted that five Public Works employees authorized to use personal vehicles for city-related business exceeded the amounts of gas they were allowed to draw from city pumps, in one case, by over 1,400 gallons.”As a result, there is inadequate assurance that all of the gasoline distributed by the city, which total 121,510 gallons for all city departments during our audit period, was used for city-related purposes only,” the audit stated.Mayor Thomas Ambrosino acknowledged earlier this week the lack of internal DPW controls red flagged in the audit.”We’ve taken steps to deal with it. We have a new system we have been slowly implementing over the last couple of months,” Ambrosino said.That assurance may not be enough to quell councilors’ concerns. They filed half a dozen motions this week directing the auditor and the mayor to provide more details on the state investigation and explanations for improved DPW accounting.