The Barton County Commission Tuesday morning received good news as it accepted the 2022 audit report, which covered the financial condition of the county from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2022.

“The nuts and bolts are that you have an unmodified opinion on your audit report, which is a clean audit opinion, the best type of opinion that we can issue,” said Jami Benyshek, senior audit manager with AdamsBrown. “Overall, I thought the audit went really well. I know there’s been some challenges with all the moving and so many moving parts here at Barton County. All the employees were great to work with and answered our questions as timely as they could and we appreciate all of their help.”

She said the county ended 2022 With a total of $25,157,000 of unencumbered cash, and then those are the numbers that carry on into the 2024 budget. This is not all county money and is a snapshot of all the funds held by the county as of Dec. 30, 2022, most which was distributed to other county taxing entities in January.  

The county started 2022 with $22 million in unencumbered money. A lot of that was COVID relief American Rescue Plan Act funds that will be spent this year, Benyshek said.

She then walked the commission through the report, including footnotes and individual funds.

“There was one statute violation,” she said. The solid waste fund went go over the budget authority, but there are no repercussions from that. She said the county just needs to keep an eye on that in the future.

Benyshek then switched gears from the countywide audit to the single audit, required because the county spent over $750,000 in federal money during 2022. “We had to perform an additional audit called the single audit where we took a deep dive into a specific program which was the Coronavirus State And Local Fiscal Recovery Fund,” she said.

Here she noted a couple “significant deficiencies.”  Again, there were not repercussions, these just had to be reported.

There were some payroll allocations were incorrectly applied to a grant totalling $156. “That might seem like very small numbers, but the federal government requires us to put it in here,” she said.

In all, the auditors sampled $2 million out of $3.5 million in federal Coronavirus funds.

And second, not all of the t all of the reports that are submitted to the federal government were complete and inaccurate. 

Even so, “those were the only actual significant deficiencies or material weaknesses that we found in either the financial statement audit or the single audit. So the financial statement audit, there were no material weaknesses or significant deficiencies that we noted,” she said.

She did have a couple of audit recommendations. 

First was a general reminder to the fee offices to make sure that when they are bringing money over to the Treasurer’s Office so their report matches back to the treasurer’s report. Second was to review retention policies for all policies for all types of records (one personnel file was missing).

“I would love to come up here and say everybody did a perfect job, but nobody’s perfect,” she said. But, they were close.

“Good job. Seriously Good job, everybody,” commission Chairman Shawn Hutchinson said. He appreciated the efforts of all county staff involved in the audit, especially during the move. “I’m very impressed with your work and with our whole team’s work.”