Politics & Government

2008 Audit Belatedly Presented to Town; Two More Expected Before Years' End

Following "special project fiasco," new auditing mandate, town receives '08 external audit.

The Town Board's outside auditing firm made its first of three projected audit presentations of 2011 to the board on Thursday, filling the board in on the town's 2008 finances. The firm says it expects to present the following two years to the town before the end of the year.

Despite being behind the eight-ball in terms of auditing timeline - audits from the preceding year are often completed by the end of the second quarter each year, for towns with adequately staffed accounting offices - the auditing firm said the town looks to be heading in the right direction. 

"I would say the town at this point is on the right track," said Jeff Davoli, a partner with Albrecht, Viggiano, Zureck & Company, P.C. "The goals set for the independent audits are very aggressive from your standpoint and the suppliers of the information you're auditing. And from our standpoint, from the schedule standpoint of getting this done. It's very difficult to get three audits done from the same organization in the same year."

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Following the external audits, according to Supervisor Sean Walter, the town plans on asking the State Comptroller's Office to perform a "friendly" audit of the bookkeeping practices of the town. While AVZ's audits look "behind the ledger" to  a limited extent, their role is mostly to make sure the town's numbers are accurate, Walter said. 

A positive report from the Comptroller would most likely help the town find lower interest rates when borrowing in the future. Davoli said that interest rates on 10-year bonds have climbed nearly half of a percent since November 2010. 

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Despite the "aggressive" goal, it seems as though the lion's share of the heavy lifting is behind the firm.

Davoli detailed the fact that "several hundred projects" in the town's capital projects fund were not properly audited from 1999 on, a fact the firm found while doing its first external audit for the town in 2007. After presenting the 2007 audit, and capital project audit, to outgoing former Supervisor Phil Cardinale in December of 2009, Davoli said the town's accounting office spent the first half of 2010 closing the books on 2008 following the "capital project fiasco."

Cardinale said the reason that projects were grouped together was that Jack Hansen, the longtime financial administrator for the town who passed away suddenly in 2006, knew himself which projects were grouped together. The town's old external auditor never picked up on the practice and AVZ, he said, has been left playing catchup since. 

However Cardinale said the gap between the 2007 and 2008 audits - 14 months - remains "suspicious." 

Davoli said on Thursday that AVZ originally had completed the '08 audit by last December, which Walter confirmed. But a new auditing mandate for municipalities, created to keep tabs on increasing costs of retirees (not necessarily report how they will be funded), threw the town's finance department for a loop. When Davoli went to sit down with Walter to go over the numbers, the numbers were off, which Davoli noticed, further delaying the final product. Walter admitted on Friday that he "should not have waited until the end of January to finish it. But you can't do everything at the same time."


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