We can’t blame the city of Springfield for being gun shy in having their audit performed by the same auditor that performed the recent county audit.
The council voted recently to hire a new firm to perform the job.
We’ve had a number of problems with how the county audit has been handled and it appears so does the city of Springfield.
Mayor Barty Alderman summed it up perfectly in a story we ran in last week’s Effingham Now.
Here it is in case you missed it: “You don’t want to wake up one morning, look in the paper … and everyone knows everything about the audit except me,” Alderman said.
Alderman and the council apparently took issue with the auditor meeting singly with some commissioners to discuss draft audit findings before they were given to the entire panel, or before the audit was actually complete. Those draft audit issues were then taken by certain county commissioners to a TV station for broadcast, damaging the reputations of two people who eventually lost their jobs.
That wasn’t kosher in our book, and not in Springfield’s either, apparently.
Items that aren’t in the audit also continue to surface and cause us concern.
These newly revealed issues in the county finance office were characterized by County Commissioner Steve Mason as more “substantial” than any issues contained in the audit.
Overpaying a lease to the tune of $2,800 a year for five years is a serious error in our opinion. Finance Director Joanna Wright has said she doesn’t know how she started making the mistake but notes she was the one to discover it.
That’s all fine and good, but why was the incorrect amount listed once again in the first draft of this year’s budget? Why did it take five years to find?
Wright’s response to finding the error was to stop paying the lease in April pending some resolution by the county attorney.
The building owner took exception to this and deputies served the county with a dispossessory notice on Tuesday morning.
The owner, according to Interim County Administrator Toss Allen, wants his three months of rent to stop any further eviction plans.
The building houses the Juvenile Justice Department.
Whether the county will be able to recover the five years of overpayment isn’t yet clear. The item was expected to be added to the county agenda at Tuesday’s meeting.
We think the problem will be resolved, but it’s yet another mess the county shouldn’t have to be dealing with.
Next mess: Overpayment of payroll withholding tax.
Payroll withholding was overpaid by $489,000.
Wright has said the problem started with a bookkeeping error.
Hmm. Yeah we’d agree with that.
We don’t understand how it happened or why the credit the county is apparently due wasn’t reflected in the budget.
And lastly — for now — GDOT checks.
Checks from the Georgia Department of Transportation apparently sat around gathering dust before being deposited.
One check was for $574,000 and it took three months to get it to the bank.
Wright has said the delay was due to some question about where the money should go.
Just how many projects does the county have where almost $600,000 from GDOT would be going?
We’d say about one. Old Augusta Road projects.
That excuse doesn’t hold water with us. Put the money in the bank and code it correctly for accounting when you figure it out.
A 2010 audit of the City of Springfield, also performed by Donald Caines, dinged the city for not depositing a check for a number of days.
That’s right days. Not months, days.
The audit stated “holding of checks on hand increases opportunity for funds to be lost or stolen.”
We’d have to agree.
These issues don’t need to swept under the rug, blamed on someone else and forgotten.
There is a pattern here that shouldn’t be ignored.