OAKLAND — Four years after the initial vegetation inspection audit of the Oakland Fire Department and two years after a follow-up report uncovered significant lingering problems, the city auditor has found this week that the embattled agency still remains out of compliance in monitoring the city’s fire-prone hills.

City auditor Brenda Roberts said three of the seven issues identified in 2014 remain problems in the department: developing a quality control process to ensure inspections are done properly; working to collect invoices on properties; and solving the parking issue on the narrow streets. These were the same three issues flagged in 2015 when the auditor’s office followed up on the original audit.

“They have to make fire prevention a much higher priority,” said Oakland hills resident Sue Piper, the president of the nonprofit Oakland Firesafe Council which found major concerns of their own this summer during an independent review of homes.

The city audit found that the quality assurance plan created by the fire department two years ago to ensure inspections were accurate and that property owners correctly cleared vegetation around their homes was not working. Battalion chiefs review three percent of all the inspections as part of the program, and this year auditors found 19 inspections were improperly marked “compliant” when they were actually not.

“The department could not provide us with the procedures or follow up they applied to these exceptions to show that property owners were advised of needed remediation to comply with defensible space regulations, or that specific training was provided to the inspector to avoid repeated errors,” the audit found.

The department teamed with the city’s revenue division to work on collecting years worth of unpaid abatement costs from delinquent property owners. However, this new program had major problems.

The fire department issued 1,369 invoices for the prior two fiscal years for inspection fees and abatement costs totaling almost $420,000. But about 98 percent of those were voided due to input errors of fire code violations and descriptions on the inspection forms, or because the owners did not have the proper time to fix the violations. There were 31 legitimate invoices, but two dozen still have not been collected.

In 2015, the city initiated a pilot parking program to figure out how to solve the parking issue in the hill’s narrow streets which obstruct emergency vehicle access. After surveying the streets with the biggest parking problems, in March the city installed “No Parking Anytime” signs on those narrowest streets.

“We have learned,” the audit states, “through observation and meeting with (Oakland Fire Department) staff, that parking enforcement in the Oakland Hills is rare even where the signs are present.”

City Administrator Sabrina Landreth responded to the audit with bullet points of changes made to the fire department.

She highlighted improvements, such as the battalion chief review of inspections, increased training in the inspection software and the transfer of 2,000 high-risk properties from firefighters to vegetation management inspectors. Landreth also said the parking enforcement division would conduct crackdown campaigns in the trouble zones and target streets during “red flag” fire days.

As for billing, Landreth said the department is still working to shift from the cumbersome One-Step software to sync with the city revenue computers. She said timing is tight to inspect and bill because it must be done during the fire season. She said the lien process and contracting with vendors has been streamlined.

The Oakland Firesafe Council study disputed the Oakland fire prevention bureau’s claim that at least 95 percent of properties were in compliance with vegetation rules designed to make sure that brush and trees are trimmed and not overgrown. Resident Nick Vigilante, who lives in the Shepherd Canyon area, helped conduct the audit.

“I saw first-hand the vegetation problems unabated, many of which could have caused a serious fire during the hot and windy conditions last month,” he said. “I found it hard to drive my car along some of the streets to do the inspections because parked cars were impeding my access and egress and they would surely have blocked a fire truck.”

Residents have long been concerned about vegetation clearance in the East Bay hills after the deadly October 1991 fire that killed 25 people and destroyed more than 3,000 homes. The worries became heightened this fire season after the North Bay fires last month killed 42 people and destroyed more than 5,000 homes and businesses in Napa and Sonoma counties.

Each fire season, firefighters are assigned to inspect about 21,000 properties, and staffing of inspectors has always been an issue.

This news organization reported last December, after obtaining internal emails, that firefighters had marked as many as 28 properties with fire hazards as compliant. There were also inspection reports completely missing from the system.