SAUK VILLAGE | While David Hanks
praised Trustees Rosie Williams, Lynda Washington and Ed Myers for voting for unbalanced
budgets in a social media post. “Thankfully,
last year the majority of the board (Williams, Washington and Myers) passed a
worse-case scenario budget” Hanks stated on his post. Residents and taxpayers should be steaming
mad at how the Village’s finances are handled, these are your tax dollars. Not necessarily what they’re spending your
money on, but the manner in which it is handled by David Hanks and his
administration. Hanks proposes yet
another “worse-case scenario budget” and plans on presenting a budget which he
states “may reqire(sic) more cuts than last year”.
Trustee Derrick Burgess voted
against the budget and appropriation ordinances presented by Hanks calling it once again “irresponsible
and unbalanced”. Trustees Cecial Tates
and Kelvin Jones also voted against the Budget and Hanks voted to break the
tie. With that said, over $1
million dollars has been “borrowed” during the last year to keep the village’s
accounts flush and to make the village's payroll. All that despite Hanks claiming that the budget was balanced. The Village’s water fund and several other funds have been tapped to pay the bills and not repair the infrastructure or other intended purposes resulting in interfund borrowing.
The recent audit report has revealed
19 material weaknesses. A material
weakness in a audit is a “deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies,
in internal control, such that there is a reasonable possibility that a
material misstatement of the Village’s financial statements will not be prevented,
or detected and corrected on a timely basis.
We (the auditors) consider the following deficiencies in the Village’s
internal control to be material weakness”
1- Audit
Adjustments (Repeated from Prior Year)
Numerous
adjusting entries were identified, proposed to, and accepted by management, and
recorded in the Village’s financial statements, as of and for the year ended
April 30, 2015. Several of the adjustments
were material to the financial statements, individually and in the
aggregate. The adjustments affected
various asset, liability, deferred inflow, net position/fund balance, revenue,
expense/expenditure, and other financing sources and uses accounts. We recommend that the finance department
(Mohan Rao) reconcile all account balances to the supporting schedules,
document and other sources of information in a timely manner, in order to
ensure that accurate financial reporting, during the year and at year end is achieved. Those procedures should include but not be
limited to the following:
·
Review of accounts receivable detail ledgers to
determine the adequacy of the allowances for doubtful accounts.
·
Reconciliation of prepaid items to supporting
details
·
Allocation of property tax receipts to
individual funds based on the appropriate tax levy extension for each distribution.
·
Reconciliation of unbilled utility revenue
balances to detail ledgers
·
Grants recorded in an appropriate manner based
on the terms of the grant agreement.
·
Reconciliation of other tax receipts to state
and other taxing authority reports
·
Review of construction, equipment, and other
invoices to determine propriety of capitalization, depreciation and accrual of
retainage of a liability.
·
Reclassification of held checks as a current
liability.
·
Reconciliation of accounts payable and accrued
compensated absences balances to supporting details.
·
Reconciliation of recorded debt principal and
interest payments to maturity schedules.
·
Proper recording of debt issuance.
·
Reconciliation of interfund transfers in and
transfers out, to ensure that all interfund transfers are properly recorded in
the transfer accounts in the general ledger.
An expert on Illinois Municipal
Finance, intimately familiar with Sauk Village’s financial history reviewed the
Village’s audit and management letter and stated the following: “I don't believe any of these
are just normal issues. In a well run environment, none of these issues
should occur. There should always be a system of "double-check"
in order to eliminate any possibility of wrongdoing. We have many of
these safeguards in place to prevent fraud and provide transparency with
taxpayer’s money. What I don't get
is the lack of attention being paid to account receivables. What exactly
does everyone working at Village Hall do? Why is it that the Finance
Director has no backup from existing staff? What does this so called Village
Administrator or the Mayor do? (by the way the Finance Director seems to have a lot of authority according to
this report)? This report is pathetic!”
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