City of Toronto cleaning services are flushing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the drain every year, according to auditor general Beverly Romeo-Beehler.

Two audits of the cleaning services with Toronto’s facilities management department, and oversight of work done by contract cleaners, uncovered the costly waste.

The city spent $30.5 million to clean 265 facilities last year, including $8.3 paid to contracted cleaners. The facilities have a total gross floor area of more than 10 million square feet.

Among the audit findings:

The city is not consistently using the industry standard of costing jobs in line with a building’s “cleanable area.” In many cases, estimates and contracts were set according to building’s gross size, including areas that don’t need to be cleaned.

The city is contracting 35 per cent more cleaning than necessary, a waste of about $380,000 per year. Also, aligning the scope of work at 22 facilities to a new corporate cleaning standard could save the city up to $2 million over five years. Contracts should be reviewed for savings and, if advantageous, put out for tender rather than renewed.

In 2011, facilities management paid $184,000 to a third-party consultant to measure the cleanable area for hundreds of facilities. Most operating managers were not informed of these. The data was not validated for most of the facilities.

The city invested another $566,000 in software, hand-held devices, and IT salaries to determine the number of cleaners required for specific jobs. Five years later, operational data has been loaded for only 15 per cent of city facilities.

Instead of a standard model for what cleaning is required, each client group, and sometimes each facility, has their own routine. Auditors estimate that standardizing just nine of the 265 facilities could save the city as much as $900,000 per year.

The audits make a total of 30 recommendations. Putting those involving contracts into place quickly, Romeo-Beehler states, “presents an opportunity to achieve significant savings on current and future cleaning contracts.”

However, her audit notes that in 2005 a previous auditor general recommended facilities management develop and implement a “performance management framework” to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of building maintenance and cleaning services.

“At the time of our audit,” Romeo-Beehler writes, “a formal framework was not in place.”