The city auditor’s office found that seven employees misused city vehicles to commute between their homes and their worksite for roughly a year.

AUSTIN, Texas — A report from the City Auditor’s Office states that seven Austin Energy employees misused city vehicles to commute back and forth from their homes for a year, costing the city an estimated $37,300.

In April 2024 the auditor’s Integrity Unit received an allegation that Austin Energy staff were using city vehicles to commute home and that management directed staff to use the vehicles for commuting, according to the report. The report notes that one of the seven employees was a superintendent over the other six.



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The auditor’s office found that between July 2023 and July 2024, the seven employees used their assigned city vehicles for personal purposes. GPS data for the vehicles revealed that all seven employees “drove their vehicles home on trips that were not for City purposes.”

The report states that by using city vehicles, the employees saved money on gas and operational expenses that they would have incurred had they commuted using their own vehicles. 

“Using U.S. General Services Administration privately owned vehicle mileage reimbursement rates for 2023 and 2024, the employees’ use of City vehicles had an operational cost of about $37,300 from July 2023 – July 2024,” the report states.

The employees placed thousands of miles on the city vehicles by commuting to various cities outside of Austin over the course of about a year, according to the report. In one instance, one of the employees had their city vehicle parked at their home for almost 250 consecutive hours, with the report noting that “while the AE vehicle was at [the employee’s] home it could not be used for City work for 10 days.”

When questioned by the auditor’s office, all seven employees admitted to taking their city vehicles home. Three of the employees, including the superintendent, said they drove their vehicles home at the direction of the group’s previous director, who they said told them “the group’s assigned vehicles may be reassigned for underuse.” The other four employees told the auditor’s office that the superintendent told them to drive their vehicles home.

In an interview with the auditor’s office, the group’s previous director said neither the superintendent nor the other employees should have been driving their vehicles home and if they were, the director didn’t know about it. They also added that it probably happened after they left their role as director of the group in August 2023. They added that if they had known about city vehicles being used for commuting, they would have told the employees to stop.

The auditor’s office found that the previous director was still briefly in a supervisory role when staff under their chain of command began using city vehicles to commute. The previous director transitioned to a new role for the city between July and mid-August of 2023, and four of the employees took their first trips home in their city vehicles near the end of July 2023 and began regularly commuting home in the vehicles in August 2023. 

“We did not find any written records or other evidence showing that the former director told staff to drive vehicles home and could not conclude that the former director violated City Code,” the auditor’s office said.

However, the office found that the seven employees did violate city code by misusing city resources by using the vehicles to commute.