Multnomah County health officials are trying to account for hundreds of thousands of dollars in gift cards, transit tickets and other types of prepaid support issued in recent years, after the agency struggled to routinely track the distribution of the items during the pandemic and the years that followed.
Staff are supposed to distribute the gift cards or other financial incentives, often used for things like encouraging people to obtain preventive health care or participate in focus groups, within a month of purchase. Workers are required to use logs to track how they are given out, and the logs must be filed to the health finance division within five business days of card distribution.
“Each card must have a clear purpose and be tracked like cash,” county health officials wrote in a training presentation last fall. However in recent years, some county workers may have failed to consistently follow the tracking requirement, according to records obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request…