Phone audit delivers wake-up call

Here’s one phone number Los Angeles County officials would rather forget: $3.5 million.

That’s how much money was being spent annually on unused phone lines across the county bureaucracy—20,906 of them—according to a new report by the county’s Chief Executive Office.

CEO William T Fujioka said the amount spent on these lines could rise to as much as $4 million as the county moves toward completing its “zero usage project,” part of a multi-faceted initiative to reduce waste and inefficiencies.

Fujioka said he knows the county is open to criticism for not recognizing sooner that unused lines were a potential source of wastefulness. “But the worst thing that could have happened,” he said, “is that the audit would not have happened at all.”

The phone line audit targeted every agency, big and small, of Los Angeles County government. In some instances, the savings amount to just a few hundred dollars, as in the case of the Office of Ombudsman, which disconnected service to two of its total five lines, saving $339.12 a year.

Then there’s the massive Department of Public Social Services, which so far has cut service to 3,791 lines out of 6,633, for an annual savings of $600,478. (For the complete rundown of department savings, click here.) DPSS Director Philip Browning said that while some of the unused lines can be traced to office moves and the loss of 1,000 staffers, complacency also is to blame.

“I think we take so much for granted,” said Browning, who praised the county’s focus on waste. “When times are tough and budgets are tight we’re forced to think about things in a different way. We don’t have the luxury to continue in the same way as when things were better.”

Browning said the audit put even him on the spot. When he moved into his office after being appointed a few years back, there were two phones, one of which rang only when it was a wrong number. “I never even thought about it,” Browning said. “I’m sure there was a good reason at some point in time for someone to have both phones. It could have been years and years ago.”

Credited for coming up with the audit idea is Thomas Tindall, director of the Internal Services Department. His agency pays the bills for the county’s roughly 200,000 lines. Tindall, who helped prepare the CEO report, called the phone study a “good news, bad news, kind of thing” because, although the county aggressively uncovered the problem, it should have been discovered earlier.

“I really cringed when I had to prepare the [CEO] memo because I knew the media might be calling,” Tindall said.

The study was a huge and time-consuming undertaking, with every department being given a list of numbers for which there’d been no “outbound usage.” Then, it was up to the departments to determine whether the lines were being used—a task not quickly embraced by everyone, said Robert Aragon, who managed the project for ISD.

“I would say it was viewed as a lower priority,” Aragon said. “What ultimately helped, the CEO’s office applied some pressure and told them to get it done.”

And that push may help get them ready for what’s on deck.

“Next, we’re going to look at printers. We have over 70,000 of them,” said CEO Fujioka, adding that toner doesn’t come cheaply.

Posted 7/14/10