SAO evaluates billing rates each summer, planning for the coming calendar year and accounting for legislative changes and other factors. The rate adjustment for 2023 is related to increased costs of both salaries and benefits.
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Fraudsters can impersonate your employees and vendors to redirect Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments meant for payroll direct deposits or vendor payments. You need to stay vigilant and ensure your government has strong internal controls. To help you, SAO has developed a new guide that offers advice on developing ACH payment process policies and employee training, establishing a verification process, and monitoring for unauthorized payee account changes.
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It’s that time of year when school districts begin preparing their financial statements. And, as we do every September, we updated our Checklist for Preparing and Reviewing School District Financial Statements to help you get ready. The 2021-2022 tool includes new questions on lease accounting, recording transactions as they occur, and non-routine events.
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Earlier this summer we announced SAO would be phasing in SecureShare, our new data-sharing tool for audits. Starting Sept. 1, SecureShare will be our primary tool for exchanging audit information with state and local governments.
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SAO has a suite of resources that can help you evaluate your payroll process and explore ways to improve it. Our guides, checklists and articles provide valuable advice that you can use right away to ensure your internal controls are keeping your government safe.
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Fraudsters are constantly evolving their wire fraud schemes, which is why you need to ensure your government has strong internal controls in place to prevent them. To help you, SAO has developed a new resource: Best Practices for Sending Wire Transfers.
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When was the last time you took a hard look at your accounts payable process to ensure it’s still designed appropriately and functioning properly? Over the last year, SAO has published several resources and blog articles to help you improve your accounts payable system. We’ve collected them all here so that you can quickly access them.
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The Office of the Washington State Auditor is excited to announce the addition of school district financial data to our Financial Intelligence Tool (FIT). Before we make this data available to the public, we are inviting school districts to preview their data and become familiar with how to use the tool.
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The Office of the Washington State Auditor’s annual audit of federal money spent in the state revealed 61 areas of concern across 21 federal programs. Because of a lack of documentation, auditors were unable to audit one entire program, calling into question at least $271 million in spending.
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The 2021 Single Audit was the first to review an entire year of how the state spent COVID-19 emergency funding. We issued 61 findings across 21 federal programs, and we are questioning more than $1 billion in costs—meaning we were unable to verify those dollars were spent according to federal requirements.
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