City Transaction Testing: Continuous monitoring revealed few issues

The City introduced procurement cards in 1997 to streamline the purchase and approval process and reduce administrative costs. The City of Portland allows authorized employees to use procurement cards for purchases up to $5,000. Procurement Services provides some overall central coordination of cardholder accounts and transactions, but individual bureaus are responsible for monitoring their employees’ card usage for appropriateness and compliance with policy.

We reviewed more than 400,000 procurement card records for transactions posted between July 2012 and June 2015, testing for transactions prohibited by the City policy and others that may signal the existence of irregularities, risks and potential fraud. We did not find anything to indicate fraud, misuse or a general lack of oversight. We had questions about a few transactions and referred them to Procurement Services for additional review.