Recently our team was preparing to give our annual report to the Budget and Audit Committee from our Board of Supervisors. The two board members assigned to this committee have not served long on the committee and it was a board meeting day. We had a limited amount of time to go over our annual report and audit plan for the next year. Our audit plan, like most of yours, is quite complex and covers a wide variety of audits not only for our county, but our public school system as well.
“...auditing really is about trying to promote the safety, health, and welfare of all our citizens and being good stewards of the public trust.” |
| As I pondered the brief words to share I decided to tell them that our audit coverage really boils down to auditing the Big Things but not forgetting about the Little Things. |
I explained to them our risk assessment process, which uses the county’s strategic goals to determine the biggest risk areas to audit.
I mentioned it is important to have all the areas, both high and low risk, on the table for regular review. I shared with them that auditing really is about trying to promote the safety, health, and welfare of all our citizens and being good stewards of the public trust. I went on to share that sometimes that means auditing not just high risk things like payroll, but also the low risk things like:
- Visiting mental health group homes and auditing the small personal funds (which the government is entrusted with) of the people who live there to test that money spent is on their behalf.
- Doing unannounced observations at our school cafeterias and watching the cashiering operations. I told them a six-year old child does not know the difference if a cashier is not properly ringing up the sales.
- Doing surprise audits and asking the narcotics officers to show us their assigned street “drug buy money” to ensure that they have not used it for a personal matter.
- Auditing activity funds in our schools and checking the kindergarten pumpkin patch field trip receipts. Testing to make sure we recorded receipts for the number of kids who went on the trip. I explained that parents would expect nothing less of us for the money provided for this trip.
At the end of the presentation I told them that auditing the big risk things are important, but if something goes wrong in the little things it is no less important. Imagine an employee misusing the funds of a client in a mental health group home and the negative repercussions of this.
I still have a number of years to work. If I am blessed enough to retire someday, I really think that I will think about the major audits my team accomplished here in Chesterfield County. But I will also look back with an extreme amount of pride if we were able to be good stewards of the little things. I will be especially proud of those areas we audited where I knew that the citizen or student was counting on us to do that job for them because they were unable to.
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