SAN JOSE — One San Jose city employee charged taxpayers $197 for part of a vacation to San Diego. Another stayed a few nights in a hotel in nearby Daly City for $822 on the public’s dime. And a group of two-dozen staffers each drove separate cars to a training in Modesto, racking up $2,277 in mileage reimbursements.

A new city audit has uncovered plenty of public San Jose municipal workers who appeared to charge taxpayers more than they should have while taking trips to conferences, training and other functions. And after five straight years of declines, the city spent more money on travel this past fiscal year than at any point since 2009.

City officials blamed the issues on the “loss of institutional knowledge” resulting from high staff turnover and cutbacks in the last decade. In response to the report, leaders at City Hall are already planning on rewriting the city’s travel policy, cracking down on problem employees and investigating cases of potential fraud.

“We take seriously insuring that money spent on travel is appropriate,” said Deputy City Manager Alex Gurza. “Any suggestions for where we could save even more funds, we will absolutely be following up on.”

Gurza said nothing in the report was serious enough to warrant employees being fired but that “corrective action” will be taken if officials find workers knowingly failed to comply with the city’s travel policy.

City Auditor Sharon Winslow Erickson’s report, issued ahead of a Thursday meeting of the City Council’s finance committee, is the first to examine city travel costs in more than five years. It lays out the results of her staff’s investigation into 300 travel receipts from the last two years, representing part of the more than $1 million the city spends each year for employee travel. Trip costs are a pittance in relation to San Jose’s $1 billion general fund but are an area considered ripe for potential government waste.

The auditor’s team did not delve into whether the employees deliberately defrauded the government or simply made accounting mistakes or had sloppy record-keeping, and the report did not name the officials it investigated.

Among the findings was rental car misuse: Though the city only allows economy rentals, one employee rented a luxury sedan, at four times the cost of a regular car, even though he was staying at a Las Vegas hotel where his conference was located. Another staffer staying at the same hotel as their San Diego training, two miles from the airport, somehow racked up 439 miles on a rental car at a cost of $667.

Flights were also problematic: Though city policy requires employees to fly economy class, one city worker got reimbursed for $146 in seat-change fees and upgrades to business class on flights to Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas. Another received a breakfast per diem on an afternoon flight to Seattle.

Another issue arose after the City Council in 2010 banned city travel to Arizona to protest that state’s strict new immigration laws. But the auditor found five different employees who went to trainings and conferences in Arizona since then because they didn’t know about the policy and it wasn’t in the city’s official travel manual.

But perhaps the biggest issue was employees’ inefficient travel. Workers paid full rates when staying at discounted hotels for conferences, did not carpool to events, racked up big vehicle mileage reimbursements when it would have been much cheaper to fly, booked limo service and stayed at upscale hotel suites. Some employees even double-charged for items by paying for them with their city credit card and then getting reimbursed in cash.

The city’s unwieldy 14-page travel manual was cited in the audit as a major problem, as was the lack of care taken by both employees filling out travel reports and managers who approved the expenses.

“Travel is one of those things where you need vigilance in monitoring,” Erickson said in an interview. “What we’re seeing here is the need for better coordination, tighter controls over these types of trips.”

Contact Mike Rosenberg at 408-920-5705. Follow him at twitter.com/RosenbergMerc.