About $2,000

in unaccounted parking fees at the Orange County Convention Center raises concern but few explanations.

Orange County Comptroller Phil Diamond voiced concerns Wednesday about $2,000 in unaccounted parking fees from a four-hour audit investigation last year at the Orange County Convention Center’s parking lot tollbooths.

The issues were raised in a newly released report after auditors recently spent two hours on two separate days counting the vehicles that parked in the convention center parking lots and looking at the matching fees that were recorded in the computer system.

Parking attendants did not record a fee for 17 percent of the vehicles Aug. 12 and 33 percent on Sept. 9, according to their findings. The convention center hosted a boat show in August and a homeand-garden show in September.

Diamond said the only options were the money was either stolen or the vehicle drivers were allowed to park for free but no records existed to verify that.

“It’s a big deal,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “There’s clearly an issue that needs to be corrected.”

Convention center spokeswoman Gwen Wilson said she was “surprised” Diamond mentioned the possibility of theft.

No employees have been terminated for theft, and the convention center performs criminal and credit background checks for all tollbooth attendants, she said in an email.

Oftentimes, exhibitors are not charged additional fees upon re-entry, Wilson also said.

“We are putting into place a measure of accountability to modify our current system to monitor the re-entry of show participants and partners to ensure fiscal [oversight] and management,” she wrote in the email.

The audit covered October 2015 to June 2016.

The convention center, which employs about 30 parttime parking employees, has three surface-parking areas containing 6,600 parking spaces. The parking fees typically generated more than $6 million every year, according to the comptroller’s office.

“It’s a lot of money,” Diamond said about the importance of auditing the convention center to monitor it for oversight. “It’s a major convention center.”

The report recommended developing procedures to make sure parking attendants enter a transaction for each vehicle and suggested installing cameras in each tollbooth. The convention center’s management planned to follow the recommendations, the report said.

The audit found other issues, although Diamond’s report raised the main concern as the parking tollbooth collection.

The convention center also used an incorrect number in an Excel spreadsheet to apportion sales-tax and parking ticket revenue, so it overpaid $6,600 in sales tax to the state, the audit also found.

The mistake was made only for parking tickets that cost $10 and $25.

As part of the action plan, convention center management planned to work with the Orange County Comptroller’s Office to obtain a refund for the overpaid state sales tax.

Another concern involved parking attendants using passwords that only contained two digits when they logged into the parking system, the audit said.

The passwords were shared and were not required to be changed periodically.

The convention center management argued that the system’s passwords can only be changed by supervisors, not attendants, but they have other safeguards in place such, as making sure passwords are deactivated for employees who are fired or quit.

A convention center spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment.