Due to all the COVID issues within the State Government, Calhoun’s annual audit has been running behind. The results were given to the Calhoun County Clerk on Friday, April 29th for the years 2019 and 2020. Both of the audits have been made available for your reading pleasure below. There were really no surprises within the audit, and no financial discrepancies for us to concern ourselves with as a community. But, it was not without issues and the issues are the same one’s the Community has been trying to overcome.
On page 2, highlighted in green, it states that the financial statements present fairly. Which is good! What’s not good is the text highlighted on the same page in red and yellow that states there are items omitted that causes the auditor not to be able to offer assurance of the information provided.
The next image highlighted in red below shows that multiple staff work from the same cash drawer, which would not be good if there are errors in discovering who’s error it was. This type of procedural error could allow someone to engage in theft or other fraudulent activities by having an excessive amount of control over the process of funds. The physical custody of an asset, the record keeping for it and the authorization to dispose of the asset, all in the hands of one person is not a good idea.
The final issue that should be addressed is the fact that there is still a lack of transparency with the community on how funds are directed. While the minutes and some images of payments made are currently on the county document inquiry site, it does not give an accounting on the amounts paid out for individual agencies and where those funds were drawn from. Although the County has received considerable funding from COVID funds, there is no explanation of what that money was used for other than it was put into the general fund. When the ARPA funds were received, several hundreds of thousands, it was determined that $700,000 of that would be used for the internet infrastructure project, but no discussion of any other uses that could have possibly been a better use.
If you would care to read the audit information in full, Ridgeview News has made both years available.
