In a special meeting Tuesday morning, Carmi City Council minus alderpersons Greg Knight and Tracy Nelson heard from Arlynne Davis, there to present the annual financial report and independent auditor finding for the year ending December 31st. It took a bit less than half an hour with Davis reporting city assets sitting at $1.5 million and liabilities just over $476,500 on the government balance sheet. The net position for the city at end of year was at $11,312,575. Revenues versus expenditures over the 12 month period showed a quarter of a million-dollar increase.
With that however, Davis did point out some significant deficiencies including some repeated from last year including procedures not currently in place to determine that utility payments received are being posted properly to utility billings. She calls those individual utilities “buckets” and says she doesn’t believe the numbers are wrong; just that the accounting needs cleaned up.
On our software I believe, what is being recorded as a bill and then when that money comes in, it’s not posted correctly in whole to what has been billed. That is throwing off our receivables per utility. I don’t think overall our receivables are wrong, but I do believe that per utility, they are wrong because those buckets aren’t being addressed the way that they should.
Additionally, Davis recommended establishing and implementing policies to ensure that an effort is made to collect all outstanding bills. That’s another repeated finding.
We have come across these old, old, old receivables that have been on the books for 30 years we think or maybe even more. And so, we are, I am recommending, and I think we may have some of these put in place to start digging through these old bills and find out what we can actually collect and what needs to be written off out of the Tyler [software] system.
The city did correct the finding with regards to the fuel adjustment charge that was recommended after the 2024 audit.
The city is next expected to meet on July 7th.