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State Auditor Susan Montee delivered the audit of Christian County last night at the Christian County Courthouse.
The state auditor began an audit of Christian County after receiving a petition from more than 3,800 citizens requesting the audit.
State Auditor Montee says the different offices in county government can create problems.
“When you’ve got county offices, each one of those county offices really runs their own department. I mean, they’ve got their own little kingdom there. And they’re only just tied together by the budget. So you know, you have a lot of areas where people can just do their own thing. But, at the end of the day, they’re all tied together with the same budget and with the same responsibilities to the public. And there are things that are set up to be checks and balances on each other. One of the things that we noticed a big example of this was in the property tax collection. Our office found this $380,000 mistake where money was owed to the schools. And so we brought it to their attention and we did recommend that they go ahead and pay it out immediately so the schools could get their budgets in order for next year. But, you know, when we did this, we said ‘Well, you know, you can make a mistake, but you ought to go through and catch it. And then, if you don’t catch it, it’s set up for everyone else to have a look at it as well.’ So, there’s a lot of areas where that could have been caught, and should have been caught.”
Officials from the Christian County Collector’s office responded to this mistake in the audit by saying some ratios were not entered into the computer system, causing formulas to calculate incorrectly. In addition, failure to properly review withholdings resulted in the error not being detected.
State Auditor Montee and her associates proposed a solution for these problems.
“Right now, for the future, the thing that we recommend is you put some long-range plans in place so that you monitor it, so you don’t come down to a financial crisis. So, they’re not broke, but they went from having a reserve of about 25% of their expenditures to 8. So, they’re in a decline, and they just need to keep an eye on it.”
Montee also proposed that the multiple problems could be handled better by treating the monies with more care, as well as having everyone working together.
For KSMU News, I’m Ryan Welch.
