AUDIT COMMITTEE SUMMARY
December 11, 2018
Audit of Solid Waste Management Department - Pay as You Throw Program
Report Issued November 15, 2018
Audit Objective
Determine if the Pay as You Throw Program is operating effectively and revenues are reported accurately.
Background
The Solid Waste Management Department (SWMD) serves San Antonio customers by providing them with programs and services that effectively and efficiently manage solid waste and items for recycle. As a part of SWMD's Recycling and Resource Recovery Plan, the Pay as You Throw (PAYT) program was implemented to incentivize customers to recycle more by using smaller garbage carts. The PAYT program provides solid waste customers with a blue recycling cart, a green organics cart, and a choice between three brown garbage carts (small, medium, or large) based on the amount of garbage they throw away; the larger the brown cart, the greater the monthly fee for solid waste service.
The solid waste fee is billed to customers monthly via the CPS Energy (CPS) billing statement.
Audit Scope & Methodology
The audit scope was CPS solid waste customer billing and corresponding revenues remitted to the City for the months of July through September 2017.
Audit Conclusions
The Pay as You Throw Program is operating effectively and customers are being charged solid waste fees at the proper rate. We determined that SWMD has a process in place to consolidate monthly customer billing data with modifications made between billing cycles. In addition, SWMD has a process to review monthly revenues remitted to the City by CPS. We also determined that solid waste customers are billed appropriately and accurately.
During the audit, we identified a small percentage of accounts where there were discrepancies between SWMD cart records and CPS billing data. We also found a small percentage of records where either the fee billed to the customer did not match the customer's cart size or where the customer was not billed at al...
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