

Lawrence Town Corridor is pictured in this file photo.

Town leaders will soon obtain the annual exterior audit of the city’s funds, which like the previous pair many years continues to red-flag a key facet of the city’s bookkeeping.
As element of the Lawrence Town Commission’s assembly Tuesday, auditors with the agency RSM will present the audit conclusions and the 2020 Once-a-year In depth Fiscal Report to the commission. The audit provides facts about the state of the city’s funds as nicely as the performance and quality of the city’s bookkeeping.
Like in the 2018 and 2019 stories, auditors uncovered that the town had a “lack of internal controls about financial reporting” in 2020, which means that the city’s procedures for tracking its dollars, property and liabilities weren’t trusted ample to make sure that the metropolis had accurate monetary records. As a end result, auditors have experienced to make important adjustments to the city’s textbooks just about every year prior to signing off on them as currently being accurate. In the end, after these adjustments were being manufactured, auditors gave the city’s financial statements an “unmodified viewpoint,” or a thoroughly clean audit, according to paperwork the metropolis supplied to the Journal-Entire world.
Nevertheless the other accounting challenges discovered in the final audit had been dealt with and did not reoccur in 2020, that the town proceeds to be flagged for a lack of inner controls is a considerable locating, although not essentially unpredicted. Like the 2019 audit, the 2020 audit flagged the concerns due to the amount of changes that experienced to be made and once more observed that most of the adjustments associated to report preserving problems such as accounts payable cutoff problems, correct earnings recognition and exercise recorded to the city’s commencing fund equilibrium.
Subsequent the completion of the 2019 audit, Finance Director Jeremy Willmoth, who started his placement at the conclusion of 2018, reported the fundamental difficulties foremost to audit conclusions were being getting labored on, but that addressing them would be a yearslong course of action and identical findings could persist in the 2020 audit.
Some of these underlying problems integrated turnover in the city’s finance section and troubles with the city’s economical accounting method. As portion of the 2019 audit conclusions, auditors stated that the finance division endured from employees turnover just months in advance of the audit commenced and struggled to continue to keep up with the requires of the everyday assignments as very well as the extra workload of the yearly audit. Considering that then, the city has been making efforts to add workers in the finance office.
In April, the Town Commission accepted an modification to the 2021 price range that added 20.5 new workers positions overall, which include two positions connected to obtaining that would enable accountants to emphasis far more on accounting duties. A city staff members memo about the positions mentioned in component that one particular element that has contributed to turnover among accountants has been necessitating accountants to do a huge quantity of non-accounting do the job similar to paying for and procurement. The town manager’s recommended spending plan for 2022 also phone calls for including a further 8 positions overall, such as one more two positions in the finance office.
Yet another underlying concern that has been cited is limits of the city’s present economic accounting method. For occasion, the system needs city team do workarounds that auditors say open up the metropolis to chance. The city has been arranging for a alternative to the technique, and Willmoth reported a request for proposals was launched in Nov. 2020. He reported the town is performing on finalizing individuals files so that the Town Fee can contemplate the proposals at its meeting Aug. 17. Willmoth previously mentioned that depending on the range and the complexity of the conversion, the new finance system would most very likely be operational sometime in 2022.
The Lawrence City Fee will meet at 5:45 p.m. on Tuesday at City Corridor, 6 E. Sixth St. Inhabitants who want to offer general public comment can do so in person at Metropolis Corridor, in writing or practically by way of Zoom, and additional information and facts about those solutions is accessible on the city’s internet site, lawrenceks.org.