Audit shows more financial problems
It’s good that Santa Fe city government undertook an audit when a fraud hotline tipster said cashiers at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center were skimming from the money drawers.
The resulting report found a lot of cause for concern — the surveillance cameras above the cash registers weren’t working, for example — but apparently no definitive proof of embezzlement by particular individuals.
Maybe the biggest finding was that city government — not just the community center — had no cash-handling policy. No one at the center was even aware of the standard accounting safeguard of “segregation of duties” — the idea of having at least two people complete separate parts of a task as a defense against internal fraud. The Chavez Center takes in $1.8 million a year.
“Essentially, there were few if any internal controls around cash handling,” the auditor wrote. “The number, extent and severity of the issues identified in this audit report are an indicator of the ... problem.”
One side issue was sloppy handling of gift certificates and passes traded out for advertising and promotional purposes. The community center’s director retired about the time the audit was completed.
The internal audit comes 18 months after the State Auditor’s Office found that more than $2 million of a $30.3 million parks and trails bond had been misspent. And after a controversy over petty thievery at the Chavez Center, in which someone was hauling off scrap metal for personal gain — there wasn’t much money involved, but the very idea supported bad stereotypes about people paid to perform public work with taxpayers’ dollars.
City Manager Brian Snyder said this week, “Anything that puts cash at risk” and undermines public trust has to be taken seriously.
Moving forward, he said,
“it should be clear to anyone handling cash in our facilities how seriously we take that responsibility.”
Here’s hoping that city officials will use the audit results to continue to get very specific with the sweeping changes to financial policies that the park bond mess inspired.
Once again, the audit makes clear that there are certain basics — like potholes, which the city also is focusing on more these days — that the city leadership needs to focus on before city leaders can make good political arguments for grander schemes to expand what city government can do for the public good.