There is a unit within the City Government in which there are many regulations that the division of labor has fuzzy boundaries, which causes duplication register and in return, tasks that nobody completes. It is the Inspectorate, the area responsible for checking urban hygiene and public buildings, supervise and monitor tippers from large waste generators to fulfill their obligation to separate waste in source. A report by the Auditor General of the City of Buenos Aires (AGCBA, for its acronym in Spanish), explains that one of the consequences of this "multiplicity of standards" is that no office controls the current rules regarding dog stool.

Beyond dog feces, the watchdog added that some of those standards even exceed the capabilities of the Directorate. For example, the fact that they have to sanitize public space with police support, if necessary, "which the entity lacks" the report says.

Indoors

The Directorate in question was born in 2007; the flowchart was changed by decree in 2009. The AGCBA suggests that formal structure, approved on appeal, "did not consider the real needs" of the area, which led the Director General to create offices. Therefore, according to the auditors, inside the dependence there began a "high development of informal structures, with employees responsible for these actions but that is kept with a level of uncertainty for the type of actions they manage.”

More about the staff: The report, adopted in 2010, recognizes that "Human Resources has a high level of commitment and knowledge of the operational tasks they perform," while noting that the allocation of employees is "insufficient" and warning that the agents who carry out sanitation, insect and rat removal in public buildings "are not being tested with clinical checks, as required by Law 19,587 health and work safety."

Moreover, the audit confirms that the Department and its areas "do not use tools to optimize and improve the development of their tasks, like a geo-referenced inspection and operating system." The research also recognizes a "low valuation of the elements" that provides adequate diffusion of their actions, and exemplifies: "This is evident in the lack -by the unit- of up to date information of the website of the City Government in regards to the activities they fulfill.”

Tasks

The functions of the City Directorate of Inspection are to control tippers and sanction them in case of infringements. The AGCBA detected that they do not know how many trucks there are in the city dumps; most companies whose trucks are seized don’t pick them up because some firms are not registered in the activity, and that the "tippers itself do not meet the conditions required in their design and security," according to current regulations.

In addition, the agency must ensure that the large waste generators do waste separation at the source. But the Director himself told the Audit they stopped controlling this "because of a lack of material, human and structural resources"; in fact, he stated that they didn’t even have the record of large waste generators.

The Manager’s Say

Before consulting the auditors, the head of the City Inspection spoke about the lack of personnel and funds from his area. "The main risk is the failure to allocate sufficient budgetary resources to cover the expenses generated by the performed actions. The Management is a newly created body that suffered from insufficient equipment from day one. In this sense, the officer continues- they require complex and technical equipment, uniforms, supplies, etc., both for the provision of personal services such as storage of chemicals. Ideally they should have a single building in which all the areas are together, which would allow the receipt of chemicals. "Finally, the director identifies the storage and control of tippers as "risky".