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Margate may be mismanaging taxpayer dollars
• No cause for alarm...yet
Tuesday,
September 15, 2009
The last thing taxpayers want to hear is that their city’s finance department is carelessly keeping track of hard-earned taxpayer dollars, especially in the face of rising property taxes and a drop in home values.
Although no laws have been broken, bad bookkeeping may be the case in Margate, according to a recent independent auditor’s report that identifies a control deficiency in Margate’s financial reporting.
According to Certified Public Accountants, GLSC & Company, PLLC, “a control deficiency exists when the design or operation of a control does not allow management or employees, in the normal course of performing their assigned functions, to prevent or detect misstatements on a timely basis.”
FAU (Florida Atlantic University) Accounting Professor, Dr. Joel M. DiCicco, CPA, said a lack of internal control within a city’s finance department may demonstrate an inability to reliably report financial data in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), “such that there is more than a remote likelihood that a misstatement of the entity’s financial statements that is more than inconsequential will not be prevented or detected by the entity’s internal control,” states the Margate audit.
In short, Dicicco said, someone in the finance department could be misappropriating funds and no one in the city would be the wiser for it.
“While the city does not currently meet any of the financial emergency conditions defined by Section 218.505 of Florida Statutes, we believe that the results of the financial indicators shows that the City’s overall financial condition is showing signs of deterioration which, if not corrected, could result in a future financial emergency,” states the GLSC report.
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