2018-01 Performance Audit Report: Cash Handling at County of Hawai'i's Mass Transit Agency

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Current Mass Transit policy limits taxi coupons to 15 coupons per week, per customer. In some instances, customers wanted to purchase 30 coupons in one week. Mass Transit employees accepted payment for the entire 30 coupons but held the customer's money for one week to comply with the policy. During our surprise cash count, we counted a Paratransit deposit totaling $1,425 for fares collected for a three-month period (10/1/17 to 11/26/17). Although the cash was counted, reconciled, and secured in the safe at the Baseyard, $1,425 in paratransit coupons was not timely deposited. Because of these internal control weaknesses, in addition to our surprise cash count discussed above, we tested December 2017 cash receipts to determine if cash received for bus fares, taxi coupons, paratransit coupons, and bus tickets and passes was deposited and recorded timely and intact. We also analyzed cash receipts by comparing calculated expected revenue based on ridership to actual reported revenue. We found that all money that was receipted - was recorded and deposited. However, we could not determine if all money was receipted. Bus Fares To ensure that bus fare revenue was complete, we: 1. Recalculated the expected December 2017 revenue based on ridership counts marked on the bus trip sheets. We then compared this amount to the total counted and recorded by Mass Transit and to the deposit. We reviewed 2,040 bus trip sheets (347 fare boxes) with fares totaling $32,750 from deposits made in December 2017. The total amount deposited for these trip sheets was $34,361. This resulted in net overage of $1,682 (more money was deposited than the calculated revenue from ridership). We found: • 301 instances (87%) where the fare boxes' expected revenue from the trip sheet and the cash deposited did not match; 13% of the bags balanced to the trip sheets (32% were under and 55% were over). • 18 instances where Mass Transit did not correctly calculate the actual cash collected when totaling the trip sheets. • One instance totaling $24.81 where the deposit was less than Mass Transit's calculated total. • One deposit was short by $49.50 and adjusted by the bank. • An average delay of 21 days between receipt (trip sheet route date) and the deposit with a high of 84 days (September 1, 2017 route sheets were Mass Transit Cash Handling Audit Results 115