City Council Approves “Clean Audit” To Be Signed And Sent To The State

The last meeting of March for the Broken Bow City Council followed the trend of recent meetings of being short and sweet. With only two items on the agenda on Tuesday, March 23, the Council did not take long to complete business for the evening.

The first item on the agenda was the audit report which was completed by Dana F. Cole & Company. The main highlight of the 65-page document was the lack of any-one-thing that would require the submission of anything but a ‘clean audit report.’ Jeffery Oeltjen, CPA from Dana F. Cole & Company, stated that there were no issues with the audit report and spent most of the time informing the Council on some of the highlights of the report.

At the end of the report, there were two issues that were addressed by Oeltjen that are often seen in audit reports from governments the size of Broken Bow and that was the segregation of duties and lack of control of processes. According to the report, the City is required to design and implement internal controls to reduce the level of risk that misstatements caused by error or fraud would be detected in a timely period by employees in the normal course of performing their assigned functions.

With a smaller size of staff that deals with a large number of city transactions, Oeltjen stated this is a very familiar situation for many governments the size of Broken Bow. He noted that while this finding is reflected in the report, the recommendation is to continue to monitor and evaluate other internal controls with the use of limited personnel. With the exception of Councilman Chris Myers who was absent from the meeting, the Council unanimously approved the audit report and voted to submit the report to the state.

Also on the agenda was the public hearing on the variance application of Country Club Estates. While the public hearing did take place, only John Sennett spoke to the Council where he stated the variance application would be withdrawn, due to other issues surrounding the rules and regulations that had been changed over the last thirty-plus years. Sennett withdrew the application request following the public hearing.

The next City Council meeting will be held on Tuesday, April 13 at 6 PM.

Share: