Todd Paris, Associate Editor and Salisbury Attorney
♦ On December 15th, the Salisbury City Council received a presentation on the city’s audit for the previous year at their regular council meeting. The document was handed to City Council members just prior to the meeting limiting their ability to review the information and ask important questions of the auditor about their role in financial oversight.
During the presentation the auditor, finance staff, and City Manager failed to disclose to the City Council and public that the audit found significant deficiencies and noncompliance materials related to the city’s financial statements, leaving City Council members and the public to sift through hundreds of pages to find it on their own.
Page 162 shows a summary of the auditor’s results and findings. The auditor discloses on this page that in the city’s financial statements significant deficiencies were identified and in noncompliance with the financial statements were noted. Page 154 outlines that “certain matters” were reported to management of the city in a separate letter dated November 18th. The auditor, finance staff, and City Manager failed to disclose these findings to the City Council and public during the meeting. They also failed to share the letter that was sent to management about these issues.
Page 163 outlines two findings, the first is the city continues to be in violation of state law related to Fibrant and the second is internal controls in the collections department were inadequate including the fact that personnel can make manual adjustments to entries without secondary review.
On page 164 the auditor recommends that both management and THE BOARD closely monitor internal controls.
How can the board follow through on the auditor’s recommendations when this is not shared with them during the audit presentation? Council members are left thumbing through hundreds of pages on their own while the auditor and staff hope those pages won’t be discovered.
Salisbury this is your city government. City Council should fire the current audit firm and hire a new one that reports all information; most importantly areas of deficiency and concern were the board should take action. City Council should also adopt a rule that staff must disclose all negative findings instead of keeping them hidden from the council and public.
The auditor and city staff have done the Salisbury City Council a huge disservice. If I were on the board, you better believe this would be fixed immediately.
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