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Q&A
Department of Finance auditor vacancies and impact on audit completion times
5:18:51
ยท
4 min
Council Member Justin Brannan inquires about the Department of Finance auditor vacancies and their impact on audit completion times. Commissioner Preston Niblack and CFO Jacqueline James provide details on the current situation and efforts to address the vacancies.
- Field audit completion times increased from 432 days to 567 days due to losing 21 auditors to attrition
- The current authorized headcount for city tax auditors is 401, with 292 active auditors and 102 vacancies
- Vacancies are due to waiting for a civil service list to be established
- The department is working on hiring back some auditors who had left for the IRS
- The high number of vacancies (102) is considered problematic by the commissioner
Justin Brannan
5:18:51
So according to the FY '20 '5 PMMR, field audit completion times increased from four thirty two days in the first four months of FY '24 to five sixty seven days in the first four months of FY25.
5:19:09
This is due to DOF losing 21 auditors due to attrition.
5:19:13
So what is the current budgeted and actual headcount of auditors broken down by title?
Preston Niblack
5:19:19
CFO James.
5:19:20
Yep.
5:19:31
I have it in front
Justin Brannan
5:19:32
of me if you want.
5:19:33
The
Jacqueline James
5:19:40
current Here we go again.
5:19:42
The current authorized headcount for city tax auditors of four zero one.
5:19:47
Active headcount is two ninety two.
5:19:51
We do have a substantial vacancy, 102 vacancies.
Justin Brannan
5:19:57
Now is that due to folks not applying, OMB taking six months to onboard people?
5:20:04
Why are there so many vacancies?
Jacqueline James
5:20:06
We're actually waiting on the civil service list to be established.
5:20:10
The ones that establish that allows us allows us to hire city tax auditors.
Justin Brannan
5:20:15
Yeah.
5:20:16
And one of the things this council has pushed for is, you know, prioritizing folks that are you know, assessors, folks that are gonna go out there and ultimately get people to pay their bills owed to the city should be prioritized.
5:20:31
I I haven't really seen that with as far as o and b is concerned.
5:20:35
But I think
Preston Niblack
5:20:37
If I may, I think one of the issues has been there in the in the prior presidential administration, the IRS got a lot of funding and was on a big hiring spree.
5:20:47
Not so much anymore.
5:20:48
We were competing against the IRS and that was causing I mean, was we were quite successful in hiring sort of new tax auditors but we were starting to lose people after they'd been there a couple of years or longer to the IRS.
5:21:06
That flow is starting to reverse.
5:21:09
And as CFO said, we have a list that's in the process being established that we intend to call, for new auditors.
5:21:18
So we expect that we will be able to fill, a lot of our vacancies in the coming few months.
Justin Brannan
5:21:24
Has there been any discussion internally with the administration as far as trying to attract some of the federal workers that, you know, the Washington diaspora that's happening here?
Preston Niblack
5:21:34
I I just had a conversation, actually this morning with city hall and with commissioner Molina from DCAS about, us hiring back some DOF auditor personnel who had left and gone to the IRS and who now, you know, are interested in returning to city employment, and sort of how we can facilitate that.
Justin Brannan
5:21:54
Do you have an idea of how much additional revenue DOF could generate if all those those 102 vacancies were filled?
Preston Niblack
5:22:04
That's hard to quantify, honestly.
5:22:07
I mean, I think we my my general approach here, general approach and our deputy commissioner for tax audit Cesar Ben Cosme and our assistant commissioner Akim Ayinde are both very conscious of we're all very conscious of the need to have kind of a pipeline and the right mix of auditors, right?
5:22:33
So we need to have new people that we're bringing on and training and developing.
5:22:37
Then we need to have more senior auditors who can handle more complex cases and can sort of do real time team training with our newer auditors.
5:22:47
So in general we've been in pretty I think we've been in pretty good shape.
5:22:53
We were our hiring allowed us to reduce the the number of cases that were sitting in the in the queue in supervisors queues that were not being actively worked.
5:23:02
You know, if we can if as we bring on more auditors in the coming months, I expect that that will come down even further.
Justin Brannan
5:23:09
Is is 102 vacancies high?
Preston Niblack
5:23:12
It's high.
5:23:13
It's yes.
5:23:17
I don't I don't like any vacancy number that starts with a one and is followed by two digits.
5:23:23
I