The Grant County Auditor and Treasurer offices are riddled with a lack of internal controls, according to the most recent State Board of Accounts audit.
The State Board of Accounts, in their recently released audit of the county’s financials in 2014, found “several deficiencies in the internal control system” of both the treasurer and auditors’ offices pertaining to preparing financial statements, monitoring of financial information and reconciliations of account balances.
Auditors at the State noted that “numerous” funds, such as the Child Support Enforcement program, were not reported, that funds, including the Schedule of Expenditures of Federal Awards, were incorrect and that the Schedule of Leases and Debt, the Schedule of Capital Assets and the Schedule of Payables and Receivables were incomplete.
Both offices filed “corrective action plans” in response to the audit, stating both will fix the mistakes by the end of the year.
The report also noted that the Treasurer’s monthly financial reports for January 2014 through December 2014 were filed in June of 2015. The monthly reports for any given month are supposed to be filed by the 16th of the preceding month.
That issue is still plaguing the Treasurer’s office, which hasn’t filed any monthly financial report since June of 2015.
The monthly financial report is important to both the Treasurer and Auditor’s offices because it allows the two offices to compare their figures, to discover if there’s any discrepancies between the two and, if there are, to correct the differences.
Without the monthly financial reports, County Auditor Roger Bainbridge said it’s very difficult to keep track of county spending and expenditures and to know what exactly the county’s financials are.
The lack of monthly financial reports have frustrated Bainbridge and members of both the county commissioners and county council, all of whom have expressed this frustration in their respective public meetings.
“I can’t tell you how much money we have on hand right now,” Bainbridge said. “I can show the council my report, but can it be wrong? Yeah, it can. I don’t think it’s off by a lot, but I can’t know 100 percent.”
County Treasurer Sarah Melford said she has taken the audit’s findings seriously and that it’s a “high priority” for her and her staff to get the monthly financial reports up-to-date.
To do so, Melford said she has reorganized personnel and positions in the office that have, so far, made a big difference. Now, she believes the office can get the monthly financial reports current by the end of the summer.
“We’re taking this very seriously,” Melford said. “The reorganizing has gone very well. We’re optimistic.”