Finally, the long-delayed annual financial report of the city is available – and it contains scathing criticism of the local government’s new financial system software.
The report hysterically is renamed the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report rather than the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report it always has been called, because some half-woke government officials decided the acronym (CAFR) might offend muslims.
As always, the report contains a wealth of useful information about the city’s finances.
But the main point of interest this year is the auditor’s comments on the computer software the city now is using to keep financial records.
It has been a bust, and the inability to generate information reliably was the reason the report on the city’s finances in 2020 was nine months late in being published.
This apparently violated several requirements, including state law.
We would like to ask bureaucrats about this, but Mayor Lenny Curry does not allow Eye on Jacksonville to talk to anyone in his administration, apparently because we have been guilty of impure thoughts, in his estimation.
The auditors did not audit the JEA, Jacksonville Transportation Authority and Jacksonville Port Authority, which account for about one-third of the city’s spending.
Carr, Riggs & Ingram, the auditors, said of some information in the report, “We do not express an opinion or provide any assurance on the information because the limited procedures to not provide us with sufficient evidence to express an opinion or provide any assurance.”
Auditors said specifically that they were not expressing an opinion of the city’s internal control over financial reporting.
“During the audit we found that financial records for most classes of transactions and account balances were not accurately completed on a timely basis. Financial reports were not in place to extract the financial information required and the financial information provided to us required material correcting entries to be made,” the report said, noting that this violated Florida law.
The cause, and the reason the audit did not meet the state deadline was “the new accounting system was not designed and implemented effectively such that it was not functioning sufficiently to maintain up-to-date and accurate financial records for most classes of transactions and account balances.”
The reporting system in question was Oracle’s 1Cloud system the city put into operation Feb. 29, 2020.
City officials officially blamed the problems on the Red Chinese virus. The pandemic prevented city employees from being able to work together, they said.
City “Haul” sources tell Eye that the system is now said to be working correctly and that the finance folks say it just had “a few kinks.”
It is amusing how the pandemic has become the Great Scapegoat for any government foul-up – except in the federal government during the Trump administration, when everything that went wrong was one man’s fault, according to the liberal media.
