Published on Friday, March 05, 2010
By JULISSA McKINNON
Menifee officials are trying to pinpoint how the city overpaid the city attorney's firm about $74,000 over a six-month period and a street maintenance contractor about $11,000 over the past 11 months.
The errors began coming to light in January when Councilman Scott Mann, chairman of a two-member finance committee, called for a review of city payments to PV Maintenance Inc., a Rancho Santa Margarita contractor hired for street repairs.
In February, Mayor Wallace Edgerton asked questions about a lawyer bill. Shortly afterward, the finance committee discovered that the city had overpaid their city attorney's Los Angeles firm, Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard and Smith, approximately $74,000.
City Manager George Wentz, who signs off on all payments before they get final approval from the City Council, said a lapse in reconciling payments with invoices appears to have led to repeated overpayments to the law firm and contractor. Wentz said he is not aware of other overpayments.
"We have tightened up internal procedures already to try to preclude this from happening again," he said. "We have to make sure all the contract amounts are clearly identified on our invoices."
Even before the overages surfaced, Mann had called for the city's second audit this year, which could start sometime next week. The $11,000 performance review, to be done by Rogers, Anderson, Malody and Scott, of San Bernardino, will focus on contracts, invoices and internal finance controls. Those areas were not covered by the city's initial audit.
"I think there clearly needs to be some improvement in internal financial controls," Mann said. "It's my fond hope that the performance review by the external auditing firm will make recommendations to help us going forward."
Invoices obtained from the city show PV Maintenance repeatedly overcharged the city an hourly rate of $139.63 for a two-man crew to do "non-routine maintenance," rather than the $127.92 hourly rate stated in their city contract. The overpayments occurred from April 2009 to the present, invoices show.
Wentz said $139.63 was proposed during contract negotiations as the rate for a two-man crew using a natural-gas vehicle.
"It's a unit we discussed ... that was inadvertently used in the billing," Wentz said
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