Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Thank you Captain Obvious!

Really? The city needed to hire Sullivan, Rogers & Co. LLC of Burlington to tell us that we needed a City Treasurer/Tax Collector?

(On a side note, the search engine on the T&G is absolutely terrible.  I tried searching for the story about the last city employee to steal from the city and couldn't turn up any relevant links.  I did get some nice links to area sports results.)

3 comments:

Nicole said...

The only way I get the search to work is from the front page, and it took me two years to figure that out.

Nicole said...

Also -- and this is where I hint at what I MIGHT actually be employed as -- the reason why this is a problem is that you don't want someone from accounting (aka your CFO) also in charge of your cash/treasury operations (aka the treasurer/tax collector).

Despite what Q says in his comment on the article, this is a major internal controls problem, because (from a good accounting practices perspective) you should be segregating those duties. (i.e., no one should be able to perform a transaction from start to finish. For example, no one should be able to issue a purchase order and also make payments.)

And I'm sure the city knows (because, really, this is Accounting 101), and I think that having someone out of that position for more than a year is problematic.

Sean Dacey said...

That was the problem a few years back when the they caught a City employee skimming money from the treasurer's office. They had no internal controls.

I'm not an accountant. But I seem to understand things that the City doesn't, which is sad. I didn't buy the excuse that "a suitable candidate couldn't be found."

I remember Rick Rushton railing against Mike Conrad when he was hired, hoping for a more qualified, out of department candidate....and Rick didn't know Mike at all.