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

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deposited on December 28, 2017). In addition, some December 2017's trip sheets and cash collected for those bus trips was not deposited until January and February 2018. The Department of Finance's policy requires deposits to be made within two working days; best practices states that deposits should be made within 24 hours. In 12 out of 21 instances (57%), the deposit ticket date did not match the date listed on the treasury receipt. The Account Clerk listed the date the deposit was processed, not the actual date the deposit was made. This may make reconciling the deposit to the treasury receipt more difficult if the dates do not consistently match. • An average of six working days (with a high of eight days) between when the money was deposited compared to when it was recorded on a treasury receipt. The Department of Finance's policy requires treasury receipts to be completed within two working days. 2. Calculated the number of expected bus routes per day and compared to the trip sheets included in the December 2017 deposits. Mass Transit was unable to account for or provide all trip sheets for December 2017 to verify all cash was deposited. Based on route and trip information provided by Mass Transit, we calculated approximately 95 trip sheets per weekday. Each route may have several trip sheet depending on route and pickup location. On average, we were only able to find and verify 78 trip sheets per weekday — ranging from 53 to 96 trip sheets per weekday. We searched several boxes of records and deposits made in January and February 2018 and were unable to locate all December trip sheets. 3. Calculated expected annual revenue from ridership data. We sought to determine if annual bus fare revenue was reasonable by comparing annual ridership numbers to reported revenue (ridership x fare = revenue). Based on the results of our cash count and bus fare testing above, we did not consider the ridership numbers to be accurate and we were unable to complete this comparison with any reliability. This type of analysis of financial relationships is an excellent management tool to monitor revenue and budget expectations. However, without reliable data, the meaningfulness of the comparison is diminished. Mass Transit Cash Handling Audit Results 116