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Bauxite reveals financial missteps |
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Tuesday, 29 December 2009 |
On a night when the Bauxite City Council ironed out details of its 2010 budget, results of a state audit of the 2007-08 budget were given, and changes will need to be made in city offices.
Although city money has been balanced “to the penny” during the past budgets each month, the audit revealed several mistakes made that will be changed in the future.
The city will no longer be able to cash personal checks. Although this practice was never advertised nor promoted, there have been several instances when city officers used money in Bauxite accounts in exchange for personal checks from Bauxite residents.
“Listen, we were doing this as a friendly community,” said Bauxite Mayor Gary Duncan. “But we’re not a bank. We never loaned any money, but they said that we cannot do this, so we are not going to do it.”
Another mistake noted was that $11,000 in sales tax from 2008 was transferred to the following year. City officials noted that it was a mistake that has not been repeated since. A minor mistake involved the numbers from street turnback funds being reversed, but it had already been fixed, Duncan said.
Duncan took responsibility for another mistake, which was combining all the revenue from different areas into a general city fund.
“That was one of my big boo-boos,” he said. “It really was just something that was done that I didn’t realize was a mistake until they told us. So we have it fixed now.”
All revenue will now be filtered through specific funds, i.e. street fund, in accordance to where the revenue should go.
The council voted to accept the audit with the knowledge that any mistakes made were honest and that during the 2007-08 budgets, Bauxite was never short any money and every budget was balanced.
The council also got preliminary numbers for the 2010 budget, which could result in a surplus if Duncan’s numbers are right. If money is available in 2010, Duncan would like to see some of it go to parks, especially on improvements to several basketball courts.
“If it all works out, I think we will have some extra money for this project,” he said.
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