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Prince George's County officials said they have changed the way county employees fuel their cars after a recent report detailing "breakdowns in key internal control activities" that have made it difficult to identify who is using county fuel depots and whether they were used for county business.

According to a review by the County Council's Office of Audits and Investigations, more than 10,000 employees filling up county cars at Prince George's 20 fuel depots avoided entering their mileage by using override codes and often used ID numbers shared by multiple people – making tracking of employees virtually impossible.

County workers filling up their cars, buses, fire engines and other vehicles failed to enter accurate mileage more than 10,800 times in 2007, according to the report, while 30 employee numbers were used to take out more than 5,500 gallons of fuel each.

People fueled their vehicles more than 76 times in 2006 and 2007 using employee IDs of people who no longer were employed by the county but were never eliminated from the database. In other cases, vehicles that had been transferred to other departments were never switched over in the system, leaving other agencies on the hook for fuel use.

The lax logging leaves the county system "vulnerable to fraudulent, abusive or questionable user activity," Auditor Lawrence E. Cain Jr. wrote in the 29-page report.

A survey of 78 employees who used the depots at a site visit earlier this year showed that nearly a third were using inaccurate employee ID numbers, the report states.

Since the report came out in July, county officials said they have eliminated mileage override codes that some workers used to avoid entering their odometer readings when they fueled up and are making sure that every employee has a specific ID number to use on the system. Workers using the county fuel depots must enter an employee ID, vehicle number and odometer reading before they can use the pumps, which are only for county vehicles.

County spokesman Jim Keary said most of the irregularities were done by workers looking to fill up their cars quickly and were not meant to scam the system.

"There was no fraud detected," said Keary, adding that some supervisors shared their login information with crews or told them to bypass odometer codes.

"People get into bad habits," he said.

Prince George's County has a fleet of more than 3,000 vehicles. The fuel depot dispenses about 4.4 million gallons of fuel a year for everything from school buses to take-home police cars. At current fuel prices of $3.50 a gallon, the county spends about $15.4 million a year on fuel.

In addition to the logging irregularities, county auditors noted that the fuel tracking system and the county's accounting system often conflict, creating more problems when it comes to billing each department for the fuel it uses. "Program and data errors" were blamed for creating confusion on which departments owe more than budgeted for fuel use.

"Currently fuel can be dispensed haphazardly throughout the county, and agencies responsible for the actual fuel usage may not be billed accurately," the report states.

The report also urges fuel depot workers to regularly check the levels at the station fuel tanks, which often did not match the estimated amount of fuel. At the county's Glenn Dale depot, auditors noted that officials overestimated the actual amount of fuel they had by more than 700 gallons numerous times.

Because gasoline is so expensive, failing to track its use can be costly. Auditors noted that about $71,000 in gas bills to "outside government agencies" were unpaid to the county as of February and that officials had no policy for collecting delinquent accounts.

Keary said the county is looking at ways to integrate the fuel tracking system and the county's accounting system and is also moving to install security cameras at some sites to monitor use.

E-mail Daniel Valentine at dvalentine@gazette.net.