Maybe they don’t teach basic accounting in City Manager school? Please note, this isn’t about our current City Manager, but our last one- Jim Dineen. The one we let double-dip because he was “so good”- except the only money he was keeping track of was his own.

This is inexcusable-

State audit finds Dayton didn’t properly track $32M – Dayton Business Journal:
A belatedly-released 2005 audit of the city of Dayton showed the city didn’t keep track of how $32 million in federal grant money was spent.

The state audit office, which released its findings Tuesday, also found the city was careless in handling some accounts and payroll procedures.

The city of Dayton is expected to respond to the auditor’s report at a press conference at 3:30 Tuesday afternoon.

Instead of keeping track of federal grant money expenditures in one place, the city relied on individual department heads to track how $32.3 million was spent, according to a release issued by the state auditor’s office.

It took the city several months to round up a document that showed how all of the federal grant monies were received and spent, said Steve Faulkner, spokesman for the auditor’s office. That’s what caused the delay, he said.

“It should have been easy for them to have pulled off a list of expenditures from their main accounting system,” Faulkner said.

And when the city did produce that document, balances there didn’t match the balances the department heads kept, Faulkner said.

Other accounting practices also caused problems, according to the release:

• Deposits that were made into the general fund didn’t have supporting documentation that showed why certain funds went where they did.
• The municipal court is supposed to transfer money to the city each month, but it didn’t happen, which caused an overage in its account by $37,000.
• Residents’ payments of water, sewage, storm water and other fees all went directly into the water department’s account, which divvied up the funds to the respective departments afterward. Doing it that way provides no assurance that the right funds are getting to the right departments, Faulkner said.
• On top of that, some residents were overcharged in storm water bills, and corrections only were made when residents complained. Faulkner said the auditor’s office did not have an estimate on how much residents were overcharged.

We may want to look at our Clerk of Courts, Mark Owen (Chair of the Montgomery County Democratic Party) and see what his excuse was for not transferring funds?

I’ve always wondered about the “Blanket PO” process the City uses to budget for purchases- it seemed awfully sloppy. Maybe it’s not the Dayton Public Schools that needs an audit after all?