Portland's finance management office cannot account for more than $120,000 spent by Office of Neighborhood Involvement employees from March 2016 to March 2017 using city issued credit cards.

The employees have yet to document what they bought and what it was used for, city officials said Tuesday.

The bureau's operations and business manager Amy Archer-Masters acknowledged in an email that this is a "serious" issue that she discussed repeatedly with the bureau's financial analyst, yet it went ignored, according to emails obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Portland's Chief Procurement Officer Christine Moody emailed the bureau's Interim Director Dave Austin and Archer-Masters on Monday, warning that she would suspend the credit cards used by 34 of the office's 64 employees if she did not see receipts by Sunday.

"ONI has been contacted repeatedly from my staff over the last year asking for batch receipts and the required documentation," Moody wrote in the email obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Austin required all the neighborhood office employees turn in their credit cards Tuesday. Purchasing card holders will be required to turn in their March 2017 receipts by the end of day Wednesday and receipts from the last year by Monday, he said.

"We're going to make sure this kind of fiscal inattention stops now," Austin said. "The public has every right to expect that their taxpayer dollars are being accounted for."

Austin took over as the bureau's interim director on March 22 following the ousting of long-time Office of Neighborhood Involvement Director Amalia Alarcon de Morris. Austin also serves as the deputy chief of staff to Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who took over management of the neighborhood office in January. Commissioner Amanda Fritz led the office for more than five of the eight years before Eudaly.

Portland paid Alarcon de Morris $144,000 to leave after she ran the office for 11 years. Her quiet resignation followed a scathing November audit that found the bureau lacked leadership and spent funding unequally and that Alarcon de Morris failed to create and execute yearly plans. Austin said Alarcon de Morris' management issues extended to reporting spending.

"Frankly speaking, I think there was a lot of apathy toward to the rules," Austin said. "I think it's both a management and staff issue. The rules are there. People need to follow them."

He said this failure to report finances and the recent audit are a reminder that managers and staffers need to be transparent.

"Commissioner Eudaly and I will continue to look at all the ways this bureau operates and look for ways to make improvements," he said.

More than 1,000 city employees across Portland's 37 bureaus have city-issued charge cards that they use for small purchases, said mayoral spokesman Michael Cox.

It is important that city employees follow city rules when using the cards, Cox said. Taxpayers expect accountability. But employees can't bust the city's budget by using them improperly, he said. Each bureau must pay any bills racked up by cardholders using its own funding, which is set at the beginning of each fiscal year, he said.

"The important thing is city policies are being followed with regards to use of those cards," Cox said. "The mayor appreciates that Commissioner Eudaly is taking a look under the hood of her bureaus, identifying problems and tackling them head on."

--Jessica Floum

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