The Summit County Council was slammed in 2020 with unexpected challenges. However, one of their final actions of the year, last Wednesday, was relatively normal, but important.
The Council reviewed their annual financial status reports and audit. Rick Brough has more.
The Council received a Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (or CAFR for short) and the results of their independent audit.
One change is that the county retained a new outside auditor. Council Member Roger Armstrong told us this was a good idea.
“Yeh, I think it’s always, whether you’re a business or a government entity, anything where you have financials that require annual audits, it’s always a good idea to change up the auditors. It’s a smart business thing to do. And it’s good security, just so you don’t fall into a pattern of somebody either making the same mistakes, or the possibility of some fraud being able to be perpetuated by having one single auditor forever.”
Armstrong admitted that every year, he has one blunt question for the independent audit—will anybody have to go to jail?
“It’s my short-cut question to essentially ask, did we do anything wrong. And then when we’re given the size of budgets and the amount of money that the county handles on an annual basis, there are always gonna be some revenue mistakes in terms of how things are booked. And that’s happened here. We also had some of our own internal challenges that had to do—and remember this was an audit of the spending and the budget for 2019. And during that period, we actually switched our payroll provider from one company to another system. And we had more than our fair share of hiccups and speed bumps trying to get that changed over. And that caused some problems with the audit as well. But the good news is all of that seems to be straightened out. We got a clean bill of health from the auditor, and we’re moving on.”
