Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Right Of Way topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Audit finds gaps in Garland right-of-way permitting and contractor insurance
Summary
An internal audit found permit-recording gaps, unregistered contractors on active permits and contractor insurance that often failed to meet city requirements, estimating about $11,000 in uncollected registration fees and recommending CRM centralization and insurance compliance checks.
Auditors told the Garland Audit Committee that the engineering department collected more than $1,000,000 in development review and inspection fees across fiscal years 2024–25 and that fee assessment generally complied with the city's schedule, but they also identified gaps in permit recording and contractor insurance.
"In total, engineering collected over $1,000,000 in review and inspection fees over 86 site development projects through fiscal years '24 and '25," Erin Penny said, summarizing the sampling and test results. The audit found that some permits — including blanket, emergency and city-department permits — were tracked outside the CRM in manual spreadsheets or Outlook, and a sample of issued permits included contractors who were not actively registered. Auditors estimated about $11,000 in uncollected registration fees from the sampled permits.
Auditors also reviewed contractor insurance documentation and found many policies that did not meet the city's ordinance requirement of $6,000,000 per occurrence. "We sampled 54 contractors who registered with the city within the audit scope and found that 21 contractors were granted registration either with an expired policy or without a policy altogether," the report states. Internal Audit recommended requiring verification before permit issuance, coordinating with risk management to create an insurance compliance checklist, tracking insurance expirations and centralizing contractor documentation in the CRM.
Management partially concurred and told the committee engineering is transitioning to a Salesforce-based portal that the audit team said should allow required contractor-submitted fields, automate expiration notifications and upload permit records to OnBase. The audit recommended interim steps — such as a risk-management review checklist — while the new system is configured.
