Agencies Need a Better Handle on Whether Vehicle Fleets Are Bloated

A survey of five major agencies’ practices in leasing cars, vans and trucks for official business found that too many lack precise gauges for determining that all the vehicles leased through the General Services Administration were fully justified.

The federal government as a whole leased 186,000 vehicles in fiscal 2014 at a cost topping $1 billion, the Government Accountability Office noted in a report released on Thursday. Planning for cost-effectiveness requires that agencies monitor whether the number of leased vehicles reflects a use that is “reasonable,” and, according to GSA officials, “agencies may choose to define their selected utilization criteria in their internal policies, and vehicles meeting those criteria would be considered justified under the regulations.”

However, federal property management regulations “permit agencies to individually justify a vehicle using criteria the agency finds appropriate for that specific vehicle,” GAO noted, though the frequency of such justifications is not clearly established.

Thousands of vehicles are owned by agencies, but the number of vehicles leased has risen (though it stabilized in recent years), prompting concern in Congress about waste.

Auditors examined vehicle leasing by NASA, the Air Force, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service and the Veterans Health Administration. They found that while all five “took steps to manage vehicle utilization, their processes did not always facilitate the identification and removal of underutilized vehicles.”

Many could not determine whether all vehicles were utilized, could not locate written justifications or kept vehicles that did not undergo or pass a justification review. These agencies paid GSA about $8.7 million in fiscal 2014 for leased vehicles that were retained but did not meet utilization criteria and did not have readily available justifications, GAO determined.

Though GSA expects agency fleet representatives to communicate annually with agency fleet managers, 18 of 51 fleet managers GAO surveyed reported that they had never spoken to their FSR about vehicle utilization. “GSA has no mechanism to ensure these discussions occur and therefore may miss opportunities to help agencies identify underutilized vehicles,” auditors said.

The agency with the highest percentage of questionably leased vehicles was the National Park Service (47 percent); followed by BIA (22 percent); the VHA (14 percent); the Air Force (8 percent) and NASA (4 percent).

GAO recommended that GSA develop a mechanism to help ensure that fleet representatives speak with fleet managers about vehicle utilization; that the Air Force and VHA modify their processes for vehicle justifications, and that the Park Service and VHA take corrective action for vehicles that do not have readily accessible written justifications or did not pass a justification review.

The agencies largely agreed.

(Image via Flickr user Terry Ross)