The city’s audit for Fiscal Year 2020 remains incomplete, and holdups in getting information from two departments are pushing the process ever closer to blowing the deadline.

Mayor Keith Gaskin told The Dispatch on Thursday auditors are still waiting for the city to turn in adequate records related to Federal Emergency Management Agency grants and municipal court fine collection in order to complete the audit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2020.

The Watkins, Ward and Stafford certified public accounting firm is contracted to complete the city’s annual audits, and Gaskin said he’s been notified that if the firm doesn’t have all the missing information by mid-November, it may not have time to complete the audit by the federally mandated Dec. 30 deadline.

Gaskin said the firm has issued the city several written notices requesting the missing information.

“They’ve hand-delivered some of them to me,” he said.

Each year, entities in Mississippi that receive public money are subject to an audit. The auditing firm presents its findings to the entity, which then submits that report to all necessary agencies, among them the State Auditor’s Office that publishes those reports online.

Wanda Holley, lead accountant for the Columbus audit, would not discuss specific issues related to collecting information for FY 2020, citing client confidentiality requirements. She told The Dispatch entities receiving federal money that had a fiscal year ending Sept. 30 (such as Columbus) historically had until June 30 of the following year to have their audit submitted to the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. Due to COVID-19, that deadline had been extended to Dec. 30 for Fiscal Years 2019 and 2020.

There is “no deadline, per se” for getting the report to the State Auditor’s Office, Holley said.

One issue in completing the FY 2020 audit, Gaskin said, is getting accurate and complete reports for projects to repair damage from the February 2019 tornado that could be eligible for FEMA reimbursement — specifically work at the Riverwalk and rebuilding the community center at Sim Scott Park.

As for municipal court, the city is still trying to nail down accurate records for fine collections and determine whether the correct amounts from those fines were distributed to the proper state agencies. For example, revenue from a traffic ticket fine is split between the city and other state agencies based on percentages set by statute.

“We’ve been working for several weeks now to try to get that information together,” Gaskin said. “I think the reason it has been delayed, from what I can tell, is just a lack of policies and procedures in place to make sure we’re handling all that information in a timely fashion.”

Even before these latest delays, the FY 2020 audit had been harried by incomplete and inaccurate information that needed to be corrected, Gaskin said, noting much of the issues predated his taking office July 1.

Auditors worked with former Chief Financial Officer Deliah Vaughn earlier this year on bank accounts that were not reconciled, for example.

“It’s my understanding that the city has been turning in documents for the audit since December and January in kind of a piecemeal fashion,” Gaskin said. “Some of the documents were returned for corrections.

“This is stuff that should not be happening,” he added.

FEMA projects
Joe Dillon is the point person for coordinating the FEMA grants related to mitigating the tornado damage.

After the council appointed him to the role, he received FEMA certification training. As a contracted city employee, he is paid $92 per hour for his work with FEMA money — money that comes from the grants only after they are awarded. The city directly pays Dillon about $32,000 in a separate contract to serve as its public information officer.

The FEMA “grants” are reimbursements for work completed to repair damage the tornado caused. Federal and state emergency management agencies combine to reimburse the city for 87.5 percent of the costs of approved projects. Some projects, such as debris removal, have already been completed and reimbursed.

Getting FEMA to approve projects isn’t easy, Dillon said.

“The minutiae detail, that is the biggest challenge,” he said. “The information is there, but you have to prove it in several ways. … It’s just sorting it all out.”

Sim Scott Park’s new $900,000 community center was completed in April, and Dillon said he is still working with FEMA to determine what expenses related to the project are FEMA reimbursable. Part of the problem, he said, was the city opted to replace two buildings destroyed by the tornado with one larger facility. Another issue is that insurance paid for a portion of the project, and FEMA can only be used for the rest.

According to a spreadsheet Dillon sent to The Dispatch, $639,874.88 was left uncovered, and the city submitted a request for FEMA to reimburse $479,906.16 (75 percent). If approved, MEMA would chip in an additional $79,984.36.

It sometimes takes six months or more for FEMA to respond to those submissions, he said.

Even with smaller projects, Dillon said FEMA red tape is bogging him down. For work at the Riverwalk, which his spreadsheet said cost not quite $29,000, FEMA is requiring a clean water permit from the Army Corps of Engineers as well as signed affidavits from everyone who worked on the project stating that no excess dirt was dumped into the Tenn-Tom Waterway.
Gaskin said the auditors still should be getting information quicker.

“(There is) not a procedure in place where that was organized as it was happening,” Gaskin said. “Now (Dillon) is having to go back and piece it together, basically.”

Software issues in municipal court
In municipal court, clerk Wendy Blunt said a software change has created issues.

Blunt said the court began using a new software program in spring 2019. Cases that predate that software are still tracked into the old system until those fines are paid off and the cases retired, she said.

However, she said the new system doesn’t accurately reflect credit card fees until a fine is totally paid off.

For example, Blunt said, if a person uses a credit card to pay $50 monthly installments on a fine, there is a $1.18 surcharge that is automatically remitted to the credit card company with each use. Until the fine is totally repaid, the software notes the surcharge as part of the fine payment, which skews the financial records and keeps them from reconciling with the court records.

Blunt said she has manually gone back and corrected those instances and, to her knowledge, has turned in all the necessary reports for the audit.

She said she is unaware of anything else she needs to submit.

Interim Chief Operations Officer Mark Alexander Jr. said fines are submitted to the CFO for disbursement to the proper accounts, including state agencies. He confirmed state agencies had been receiving disbursements from fines each month.

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.