Mistake to cost Maumelle more than $40,000 a month

MAUMELLE — The city will be required to pay around $40,000 a month to the Department of Finance and Administration after an audit discovered a mistake related to the city’s sales-tax revenue, officials said.

Shannon Vega, certified public accountant and director of the city’s finance department, announced Mondy during the City Council’s virtual meeting that she had been told by the state finance department that an audit and local cap rebate had resulted in a reduction of $364,200 in sales-tax revenue.

Vega said the city will repay the amount through monthly revenue reduction payments of $40,767 until the end of the year.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Vega said. “They paid into the wrong cities.”

Mayor Caleb Norris said the city learned about the revenue reduction Monday afternoon.

“We are trying to find out what the look-back period on that is,” Norris said during the meeting. “To see if it was due to recent increases in revenue or a longer-term issue, but either way not news we wanted to hear.”

Norris said Tuesday that the Department of Finance and Administration hasn’t told the city exactly what went wrong because of confidentiality concerns.

“We immediately inquired about the look-back period, but they couldn’t tell us,” he said. “The state tells us there was mistakes and we were overpaid. We don’t know if somebody has been paying $10,000 too much or if this was a longer-term issue.”

Vega said Tuesday afternoon that all she knew was that large adjustments were made to the sales-tax revenue because of the audit and the local cap rebate that kicked in sometime in March.