Local governments

Today marks the premiere of the Center for Government Innovation's limited series, “Fish Tank,” on SAO's Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

Governments that spend $750,000 or more in federal awards during their fiscal year must receive a Single Audit to determine their compliance with certain federal requirements. If your government has received a Single Audit—either annually or at some point in the past—you might have wondered how your auditor selected federal programs for audit.

In this bonus edition of our FIT Data Stories series on COVID-19's effect on our cities and towns' revenues, we use our Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT) to take a deep dive into how the pandemic affected Washington's border towns and special districts. Scroll through our interactive infographic to get a better picture of the pandemic's financial effect on our state.

 

The influx of money from the Coronavirus Relief Fund (Assistance Listing 21.019) prompted many cities and counties to make more subawards than they have the past. Passing along federal money to others does not relieve governments of grant compliance requirements—in fact, it adds to them. The State Auditor's Office is seeing an increase in audit issues around subrecipient monitoring, primarily due to lack of awareness of the requirements.

Updated: December 9, 2021

The State Auditor's Office will start the annual process of updating the BARS Manuals (GAAP and Cash) on Monday, Dec. 13, 2021.

During the updates, sections of both online BARS Manuals will be unavailable for your use. Once updated, they will be fully available for accounting and reporting guidance related to fiscal year 2021 and forward.

We will notify local government audit contacts via email when we have fully updated the BARS Manuals.

While the city of Wapato's financial safeguards have improved somewhat since the city's last audits, the Office of the Washington State Auditor found significant weaknesses in two audits released today.

“The city had a lot of ground to make up in instituting appropriate polices and controls after our last round of audits. Nevertheless, the public expects all governments to be accountable at all times,” State Auditor Pat McCarthy said. “I am concerned by the pace of improvement in Wapato.”

The Center for Government Innovation at the State Auditor's Office is excited to announce our new Accounts Payable Guide for local governments. Use this guide to find ways to improve your operations and discover best practices.

This guide has something for each role in the accounts payable process, whether you are:

When was the last time you reviewed and updated your deposit process? Deposits become so routine that it is easy to forget that your internal controls might need adjusting as your financial activity changes over time. On top of that, there are new options and technology for deposits that can help you strengthen your security measures.

Here are some tips and resources to get you started:

The Department of Retirement Systems's (DRS) 2021 Participating Employer Financial Information (PEFI) report showed that six out of eight state-sponsored pension plans are fully funded. While this means that these plans are in a better position to provide pension benefits to employees who are enrolled in them, it also means that many more governments will be reporting a net pension asset this year instead of a net pension liability.

Every local government in Washington is legally required to submit an annual financial report to the State Auditor's Office. In turn, SAO is legally required to publish the data from that annual report and make it available to the public. We do this through our online Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT).

Every quarter, we publish an updated snapshot-in-time of the financial data SAO has, which ensures that FIT contains the most recent data for every local government that successfully filed a report.