Even so, getting the city in the black will be challenging. Big moves that will yield fast savings are far and few between. The audit did, however, find numerous examples of potentially wasteful spending.
According to 221-page report released by Whitmire last week, employees have been using credit cards designated for city business to make purchases from prohibited vendors such as Amazon, and peer-to-peer cash transfer platforms such as PayPal or Venmo. If that sounds like small potatoes, consider that the magnitude of annual spending on these purchasing cards was roughly $23 million in the last fiscal year. Chris Newport, Whitmire's chief of staff, told us that most of the suspicious purchases they found were "in the category of policy violations or policy cuteness," such as making repeated purchases at different Home Depots for items that approached the city's $3,000 limit on single transactions. Even if every single purchase was related to city workers' jobs, that's not responsible cost management.