Does MARTA owe Atlanta $70M? New report claims 2024 audit is wrong
ATLANTA - A new report from MARTA auditors paints a different picture of an ongoing funding battle between the agency and the city of Atlanta.
The report from auditors KPGM showed that MARTA did charge for more services than it provided in the first six years of the More MARTA program but much less than the $70 million the city claimed it overcharged.
The backstory:
In 2016, voters overwhelmingly voted to approve a sales tax to expand and improve the area's bus and train services.
Last year, the city released an independent audit from the firm Mauldin & Jenkins that officials said revealed upwards of $70 million in discrepancies over money spent and the actual cost of services from 2017 to 2022.
"The auditors found that certain years, the auditors couldn’t find how MARTA made the calculations for the service deliveries," Atlanta City Council President Doug Shipman told FOX 5 at the time.
While MARTA admitted to some errors between 2020 and 2022 summing up to about $20 million, the transit authority disputed the claim it owed the city $40 million for expanded bus and train services from 2017-2019.
Does MARTA owe Atlanta $70M?
MARTOC is the joint legislative committee that was created to oversee MARTA. In a letter sent earlier this week, the chairwoman of that committee called for a second look at the numbers that showed MARTA owed tax payers as much as $70 million.
State Rep. Deborah Silcox, who serves as chairwoman of MARTOC - the legislative body that acts as a ‘watchdog’ over MARTA spending - said she had concerns over the report and the agency's response. She asked to hear from accounting firm KPMG on its own investigation of the findings.
"I just would like to see another set of numbers and another professional opinion about this whole situation," she added.
What they're saying:
At a committee hearing at the State Capitol on Tuesday, KPMG's representatives said their assessment showed MARTA overcharged the operation account by $865,000, not $70 million.
The difference between their result and the one done by Mauldin & Jenkins came down to how MARTA service is calculated, KPMG's Julia Barrientos said.
"It caused a lot of differences in the dollars," Barrientos told lawmakers.
Mauldin & Jenkins' audit used a "threshold methodology" that didn't consider changes in operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, when services were cut. Those decreases were incorrectly attributed to the More MARTA program, but KPMG's Victoria Fenley said that should not have happened.
"It really ended up not being the right methodology for MARTA to be using," Fenley said.
Instead, she said MARTA should have used a "proportional method," which uses December 2019 as the baseline after the More MARTA program stabilized.
What's next:
MARTA CEO Collie Greenwood told lawmakers the agency has transferred "close to $20 million" to the city of Atlanta to assure the city that they are working to move forward.
The agency says it will work with additional recommendations from KPMG.
The Source: Information for this report came from a hearing by MARTOC and previous FOX 5 reporting.