San Jose Audit Follow-Up Leaves 73 Recommendations Open

San Jose departments implemented or closed 29 audit recommendations during the six months ending June 30, 2026, while 73 recommendations remained open, according to a new City Auditor follow-up report.

The report, dated September 11, reviews 102 recommendations. Of the open items, 57 are partly implemented and 16 are not implemented. The City Auditor presents the figures as a follow-up to earlier audits, not as new audit findings.

Progress alongside unfinished work

The City Auditor’s Office said San Jose has implemented or closed 90 percent of the recommendations issued over the past decade, above the City Council’s 80 percent target. That decade-wide figure covers 623 recommendations and should not be treated as the completion rate for the 102 recommendations reviewed in this report.

The current review excludes nine recommendations from the 2026 audit of the affordable multifamily housing loan portfolio, which was presented to the City Council in August. Those recommendations are scheduled to appear in future status reports.

Examples of work implemented or closed during the latest six-month period include procurement tracking and updated purchasing guidance, new sewer-rate procedures, and changes to interim-housing agreements requiring grantees to monitor residents’ progress toward housing plans.

Resident-facing services remain in progress

Several open recommendations involve services residents use directly. The Planning, Building and Code Enforcement Department reported that it is developing a process to prioritize vital documents for translation and working with the Information Technology Department to add translation options to SJPermits.org. The recommendation is classified as not implemented, with a December 2026 target delayed from December 2024.

SJ311 language support is partly implemented. The City added Cantonese and Mandarin options to the customer call center phone tree, but support for Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese in the SJ311 website, mobile application and related phone-tree integration was deferred during a platform transition. The target date is now June 2027, delayed from June 2026.

At interim-housing sites, a centralized maintenance management system is expected to let the City and site operators submit maintenance requests and track work orders. The Housing Department expects the initial rollout to begin in October 2026. The recommendation remains partly implemented, with a December 2026 target delayed from August 2026.

Police overtime and fleet controls

Police overtime oversight is also partly implemented. The Police Department is working on a process to monitor compliance with existing expectations that unplanned follow-up and report-writing overtime receive review and approval from immediate supervisors during timesheet approval. The target date for that compliance-monitoring process is February 2027.

The report does not say police overtime spending itself was improper. The recommendation concerns monitoring compliance with the City’s overtime approval expectations.

Public Works developed dashboards to track preventive maintenance for City vehicles and established a goal of completing 80 percent of required maintenance within 10 days of receiving a vehicle. The department also reported beginning to disable fuel access for vehicles that are not brought in for required maintenance and is finalizing email notifications for department directors about overdue vehicles. That recommendation remains partly implemented, with an October 2026 target delayed from December 2021.

Council review is scheduled for September 22

City Council File 26-970 lists the status report for City Council consideration on September 22, 2026. The file was agenda-ready, and no final action was recorded as of September 14.

Other listed milestones include December 2026 targets for permit-language access and procurement-policy work, the October 2026 interim-housing maintenance rollout, the October fleet-maintenance target and the June 2027 SJ311 language-support target.

Sources

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