Financial Management

YAKIMA – The Office of the Washington State Auditor published two audits of the City of Wapato today, documenting significant violations of government standards.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Governments in Washington must exercise care when creating and implementing programs to compensate employees beyond their base salary.

Set of modern electronic devices, computer laptop, digital tablet and mobile smart phone on wooden table

Recently, the Performance Center provided several resources on accounting for capital assets to help local governments with financial reporting. Another group of assets, which fall below a government's capitalization threshold, should also be considered when establishing and evaluating asset policies and other internal controls. In Washington, we frequently refer to these as “small and attractive assets,” but they these could be described using different terminology.

Are you reporting your activities in the correct fund type? Local governments should analyze the services they are providing and determine if the fund types used are appropriate.

An enterprise fund is a fund that may be used to report any activity for which a fee is charged to external users for goods or services. We have observed that local governments sometimes are not reporting enterprise activities in the correct fund type, and noted the following areas of concern:

Last fall, we posted an article strongly encouraging governments to start evaluating activities that might be classified as fiduciary activities under the Governmental Accounting Standards Board's (GASB) recently issued Statement No. 84.

Counties use property tax levies to collect funds for county roads. State law

Part of management's responsibility for financial reporting and safeguarding of public resources is to regularly evaluate its financial condition and develop plans to address any serious issues.

Many local governments use a third-party receipting vendor to provide electronic payment options to their constituents.