Performance Audit of Take- Home Vehicles in the King County Sheriff’s Office

We found that changing the program entirely, by moving KCSO from its existing take-home vehicle program to a pooled vehicle program, would not result in cost savings given KCSO’s current structure and organization. However, there are some patrol areas (e.g., some zones and contract cities) and non-patrol functions (e.g., detectives and command staff) where the current program is more expensive and where savings are possible.

We also found that while officers are allowed to use their assigned vehicles for off-duty work, KCSO does not track the magnitude of this work nor does it have a system in place to ensure the County is reimbursed for the use of its vehicles. Another way the costs of the take-home program to the County could be reduced is through cost sharing. Currently, while both the County and officers benefit from the take-home policy, the County bears the cost of the program. This division of costs reduces the incentive for staff to live close to where they work and could be one of the reasons we found commute mileage is such a large percentage of total vehicle mileage. We estimate that commuting annually represents more than six million miles, or 56%, of the total miles driven by KCSO officers in county-owned vehicles.

We make a number of recommendations in this report to improve both the transparency and operations of the current program, including having KCSO develop a plan to more accurately track off-duty work by its officers and take steps to ensure it is collecting reimbursements from employers for use of county-owned vehicles. We also recommend that the County Executive, in consultation with the King County Sheriff's Office, assess options to more equitably share the costs of commuting with KCSO employees with assigned vehicles.

This audit compares the costs of the current program with a pooled or shared vehicle system. More than thirty years ago the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) instituted a take-home vehicle program that assigns each officer a vehicle to use for both commuting and while on-duty. It currently spends more than $7 million annually to operate its vehicle fleet.