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Campbell official says he’s making progress
By jeanne starmack
campbell
Campbell’s finance director says he’s making good progress in catching up with a backlog of monthly bank statements that are unreconciled with the city’s books.
Finance Director Mike Evanson said the deadline to have the reconciliations done is pushed back because the state did not finish its annual audit at the end of March.
The original deadline was July 31, but the state’s audit was finished May 6. Evanson said that now he likely will finish the reconciliations in August or September.
He said Tuesday he is finishing March of this year.
“I’ve been working on them every week,” he said.
The backlog began under the city’s previous finance director, whom the mayor replaced at the end of January.
Evanson took the post Feb. 1.
The previous finance director, Sherman Miles, took office at the end of 2009. He first said he had trouble doing the reconciliations because he did not know how to do them. He told The Vindicator in June 2011 that the state had helped him reconcile the books and statements from January and February 2010, but did not teach him the process.
Miles wanted more help from the state, but the chairman of a committee that oversees the city while it is in fiscal emergency would not let him pay the state to reconcile the books, saying it was his job to do so.
Miles then hired a consultant with his own money to help him reconcile books and statements through April 2010.
By December 2011, however, Miles still was unable to reconcile past April 2010. The city administrator had approved hiring a private accountant and paying her up to $1,000 to help him.
At an oversight commission meeting that month, Miles told the committee chairwoman he wasn’t getting the cooperation from finance department staff to do the reconciliations.
Chairwoman Sharon Hanrahan of the Ohio Office of Budget and Management said then that the unreconciled books were the biggest problem keeping the city from asking for release from fiscal emergency, which it’s been in since 2004.
Mayor Bill VanSuch then sought to replace Miles.
Evanson said Tuesday that the books should be done before the end of the year, when the city can ask again for release from fiscal emergency.
“There are some deficiencies in current [accounting] software that are supposed to be updated,” he said, adding that new software was supposed to be in place in April but that was delayed until August.
He said the new software will make it easier to finish the reconciliations.