The Ft. Lee County Port Authority (That’s the outfit that runs the Ft. Meyers, Florida, Airport) performed an audit. Here are some of the quotes from the article:
Port authority director Bob Ball said people frequently lose tickets, and lost tickets don’t necessarily mean lost money.
“No systems runs perfect,” he said. “But we’re very, very pleased with the results of the audit.”
Ball said the old computer worked fine, which is why it was brought over from the old terminal.
“Sometimes things that are old work better,” he said.
Short said he has no reason to suspect missing funds. He says auditors
are very careful, however, especially after they uncovered the theft of
more than $40,000 from county toll proceeds in 2005.
As I understand it (The article is a bit confusing but I will attempt to parse it for you) the county auditors did an audit of the airport parking facility. They found just over 12,000 tickets missing for last year. That’s about 1% of the tickets issued. They say that the place is under control and the results are great!
Lets see — if you figure that the average person that parks at the airport stays 3 days (a conservative guess, I think) that means each of those tickets is worth $30. That means that the outfit lost $360,000 last year…and that’s just in missing tickets.
I wonder…
I wonder if the auditor counted the "lost ticket" slips turned in? If they did and got $12,000 that means that the city lost only $240,000 (Lost ticket pays full daily rate).
I wonder if the lost tickets were swapped for the big money tickets — like say the people who stayed a week. So if only half the lost tickets were swapped for 7 day tickets (the one day tickets were kept and the seven day tickets "lost"), our numbers are back up to $360,000 stolen.
I wonder if anyone looked at the counters in the lanes (assuming there were counters in the lanes) and discovered just how many cars actually parked in the facility.
I wonder if anyone took a look at the cashiers and checked out what kind of cars they drove?
I wonder if the county auditors have ever audited a parking facility before.
Oh yes, the other great quotes:
Short said there’s no way to know whether any money is missing, but a
spot check done on Feb. 27 of this year found the automated system
counted 68 cars in the long-term lot for 10 days or longer. The nightly
license count had 60.
That’s only a 12% error factor on one day…looking better and better.
“There’s a lot of missing tickets, and there’s gaps in the numbers,”
said Short. “The company (I assume this is the operator) was very cooperative and they’re going to make
some changes.”
I’ll bet they did..
This is why airports typically make operators responsible for every ticket. The numbers are so large that even a 1% error factor can mean big bucks.
JVH
