Carson City Audit Committee starts looking ahead to 2017

The Carson City Audit Committee, which will soon wrap up this year’s city work program, began looking at areas of focus for 2017.

Mark Steranka, partner, Moss Adams LLP, the city’s internal auditor, presented to the committee Tuesday a possible $145,000 budget for projects that could include a review of the way the city handles small works projects and inventorying its fees and charges.

Steranka said a few calls to the fraud, waste and abuse hotline have involved so-called small works or construction projects.

He said at the committee’s meeting in March no fraud was found, but a review of the projects did reveal a lack of procedure around how they are handled that the city should address.

Steranka suggested the city look at creating a comprehensive document of all its fees and charges, when they were last revised and other data on them.

At the meeting in March, he also proposed the city look at where fees are defined and set because fees written into municipal code are more difficult to change than fees set by policy.

Steranka said the committee might use the upcoming performance measurements data the city plans to launch soon on its redesigned web site to help determine what areas need to be worked on in the future.

Other items in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2017 included IT controls testing, audit findings validation and purchase testing.

Committee member Supervisor Lori Bagwell asked Steranka to come up with a list of items commonly covered in internal audits so the city can be sure it’s looking at all items, even if not flagged by an audit, at least periodically.

The committee will decide what proposed projects to focus on in 2017 at its next meeting.

The committee also heard the final report on the Cash Handling/Revenue Collection Improvement Project.

The city handles approximately $10,000 a day in cash at various venues such as the aquatic center and at special events.

“When you think of cash handling there are two models. Central guidance, where you make adjustments by exception,” said Steranka. “Or decentralized where you decide at department level.”

Steranka said the best practice was a centralized model.

He delivered a report on advisable basic policy, such as how to move money, how often to balance funds and other common procedures, without a section on safety and security.

Steranka said that was delivered to city staff in a confidential memo in order to protect people who handled the cash.

“I feel strongly the cash handling policy should be citywide,” said committee member Donald Leonard.

The rest of the committee agreed, and directed staff to write up the policy and deliver it to the audit committee at its October meeting.

The committee heard an update on this year’s ongoing work program, including testing of a city payroll and purchasing card, called a p-card, which should be completed in June and reported to the committee in July.

Steranka said the 2016 work program was coming in $5,000 to $10,000 under budget, primarily because city staff didn’t need help with the policy and procedure project.