RTD audit packet lists seven overdue high-priority action plans

A packet prepared for RTD’s Sept. 10 Audit Committee meeting lists seven high-priority management action plans as past due as of Aug. 31, including three involving overtime and extra-shift procedures and two involving security-incident reporting. The records do not establish that the overdue plans caused a specific passenger, safety or reliability failure.

The list appears in the RTD Audit Committee packet, which also includes the agency’s July 20 Operations–Service Development audit. That audit rated the function “Needs Improvement” and identified problems with service planning, reliability monitoring, light-rail passenger counters and fatigue-management documentation.

The seven past-due plans are:

• Contracted Services–Information Technology Support, Observation 2: financial disclosure forms for contracted IT services, targeted for June 30, 2026. No completion status was listed.
• ITGC, Observation 4: Oracle user-access deprovisioning, with a revised June 30, 2026, target after an original June 30, 2024, target. Internal Audit was confirming whether Legal had completed its review; completion was not verified.
• Security Incident Response, Observation 2: written security-incident reports, targeted for Dec. 31, 2025. No status was listed, and the packet does not link the overdue work to a specific incident or passenger harm.
• Security Incident Response, Observation 3: weekly National Incident-Based Reporting System reporting, with a revised March 31, 2026, target. The action was partially implemented, but new commander positions had not been created.
• Staff Scheduling Extra Shift/Overtime, Observations 1-3: overtime policies and procedures, extra-shift standard operating procedures, and extra-shift assignment and documentation, all targeted for Dec. 31, 2025. No status was listed for any of the three.

The packet says RTD had 57 open management action plans, including 31 past due and seven classified as high priority. Internal Audit was seeking evidence from responsible departments to confirm corrective actions. Completion remained unverified for five of the seven plans: the contracted-IT financial-disclosure plan, the written security-reporting plan and all three overtime and extra-shift plans. The NIBRS action was partially implemented, while the Oracle-access action was still being confirmed.

The three staffing plans bear most directly on service reliability and safety because they concern overtime and extra-shift management. But the tracking table does not say that they caused missed trips, unsafe staffing or fatigue-related events. The security plans concern safety oversight rather than directly documented on-time performance. The financial-disclosure and Oracle-access plans have no documented passenger or service-reliability connection in the packet.

The separate Operations–Service Development audit found that RTD’s service standards had not been updated as required and that the agency lacked documented methods for identifying the causes of unreliable service and correcting them. Bus on-time performance was below the agency’s 82% goal in six months of 2023 and 11 months of 2024. Most light-rail services missed the 92% target during the reviewed May-through-December periods in 2023 and 2024; selected rail runboards ranged from 36.54% to 91.22%.

The audit’s corrective-action plans included recruiting bus and rail operators, revising service standards, creating a process for evaluating underperforming routes and establishing a service-change retention log. The packet says the log was underway and expected by Sept. 30, 2026. It also says automatic passenger counters had been installed in 135 light-rail vehicles, or 67% of the fleet; RTD planned to evaluate installing them in the remaining vehicles because incomplete coverage could affect ridership data used in service-change decisions.

Two Operations–Service Development actions were reported as fully implemented by the audit’s July 20 issuance: a formal fatigue-management plan for bus operations and deactivation of Ridecheck Plus access for terminated employees. The audit had found about 58 former employees with read-only access as of March 2025. Internal Audit’s broader request for evidence means those reported completions should be distinguished from independently confirmed results.

RTD’s March 2026 Bus Operations report listed on-time performance of 84.34% for local bus service, 84.51% for regional bus service and 84.71% for regional bus rapid transit—above the 82% bus target. Those figures cannot establish performance for July 2026 or show whether the audit-period reliability problems had been resolved throughout the system.

RTD’s September 2025 Rail Operations report listed light-rail on-time performance at 90.58%, below the 92% target. The report’s figures predate the July 2026 audit by 10 months and are not a contemporaneous measure of current rail performance. RTD’s on-time-performance dashboard identifies bus and rail performance as tracked measures, but the accessible page did not provide a dated, static July 2026 numerical export.