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Audit finds control gaps in San Antonio finance P‑Card program; committee approves recommendations
Summary
An internal audit found weaknesses in policies, transaction monitoring and card controls for the City of San Antonio finance P‑Card program, noting outdated user guidance, potential restricted purchases and inactive cardholder access; the audit committee accepted the report and directed follow-up.
The City of San Antonio Audit Committee on Sept. 2 accepted an audit of the finance purchasing‑card (P‑Card) program that identified control weaknesses in policies, transaction monitoring and cardholder access.
Audit manager Abigail Estevez told the committee auditors "determined that finance had adequate controls to provision P Card program participants," while also identifying "opportunities for improvement" including an outdated P‑Card user guide, transaction-monitoring gaps and instances where access lingering after employee separations was not timely revoked. The auditors said they reviewed about eight months of data—roughly 20,000 transactions during the sample period—and performed keyword and merchant‑level analyses to identify potentially restricted purchases and opportunities to use contracts.
Committee members pressed staff on the scale of the issues. Councilman White noted that auditors found 502 of 1,135 transactions (about 44%) in a reviewed reports category remained unapproved for three or more months and described the findings as concerning for public perception. Finance officials, including Deputy Finance Director Melanie Keaton and another finance representative, told the committee they had reviewed the flagged transactions, cleared most of them, and found no evidence of disallowed costs after manual follow‑up. Ben (a finance staff speaker) summarized the program’s scale: "we're talking about $7,300,000, 26,000 transactions," with an average transaction below $300.
The report recommended updating the P‑Card user guide, strengthening transaction‑monitoring analytics, reviewing credit‑limit allocations and tightening access controls. Finance agreed to corrective action with a tentative completion date of June 2025 and committed to closer coordination with the auditor’s office. The committee voted to accept the audit report and its recommendations and directed staff to follow up; members discussed moving the audit’s next cycle sooner than originally scheduled because of the program’s volume.
