Thursday’s meeting
Commissioner Jay Trost called for a forensic audit of Curry County’s treasury department and its accounting practices on Thursday, saying that an investigation of past practices revealed it may have short- changed the area’s special districts.
Trost told his colleague Brad Alcorn that he, Finance Director Keina Wolf and the current county treasurer, Nick Vicino, had conducted a reconciliation of the county treasury for two fiscal years leading into the 2023-24 budget season.
That reconciliation revealed that the county had been holding on to tax revenue that belonged to other special districts and had erroneously recorded the transfer of those dollars when they were never actually transferred, Trost said. When the error was discovered, the dollars were no longer available to be transferred, he said.
The reconciliation also uncovered several other errors, Trost said, including bank fees and $66,000 in deposits that hadn’t been recorded and $3.7 million that had been transferred into other accounts “other than those recorded in the fiscal system.”
“We had overdraft charges to the county bank account that had rolled over for 11 months,” Trost said Thursday. “We had $601,180.32 in deposits that weren’t recorded in the fiscal system for up to three months — we were obviously behind in our reconciliation by two years. And we had over $32 million in bank adjustments during that time period.”
According to Trost, the county is still working to get the right property tax percentage paid out to special districts — he noted that the Treasury Department’s responsibility is to make sure each is paid according to their tax base.
Trost said several special districts had notified the county that they had received the wrong amount, this includes the Winchuck Volunteer Fire Department and local school districts.
Curry County is still working to make things right, he said.
“[As of] April 2024 and going forward, I think we have been doing it correctly,” Trost told Alcorn.
Trost asked Wolf to help prepare a request for qualifications to figure out how much a forensic audit would cost.
The Board of Commissioners had established new fiscal policies in November 2023, Director of Operations Ted Fitzgerald told them Thursday. It took about six months to correct the errors, he said, adding that he had just been hired during the 2023-24 budget season when county staff began to work on fixing them.
Commissioner John Herzog was absent on Thursday.
On Friday, Fitzgerald, who is also the county’s legal counsel, said Dave Barnes was the treasurer when the reconciliation “fell out of bounds.”
“Prior to that, it’s my information that the county knew how much money it had,” Fitzgerald told Redwood Voice Community News on Friday.
Barnes was appointed to the Curry County treasurer position in 2021 and was elected to the position in 2022. He retired from the position on April 3, 2024.
When reached for comment, Barnes said he hadn’t seen the recording of the Board of Commissioners’ meeting Thursday.
“This is the first I’ve heard of this,” Barnes told Redwood Voice, referring to the errors Fitzgerald said occurred in the Treasury Department during his tenure. “So until I can look into it further, or they contact me, I don’t have anything to say about it.”
When asked to go into detail about the $32 million in bank adjustments Trost had mentioned, Fitzgerald said it had to do with the Treasury Department failing to record deposits and failing to record expenditures. As a result, they were continually having to make bank adjustments, he said.
“It’s so irresponsible, and that was what was going on before I got there in October of 2022 and it continued until we got Keina Wolf in there,” Fitzgerald said. “Really it’s continued because we were trying to get things reconciled. I had put the finance department in charge of that — one of our employees working together with Treasurer David Barnes — they were working to get everything reconciled and I think they had been tasked with that since early 2023. I want to say mid 2023, that’s when I realized they were making headway.”
On Thursday, Fitzgerald told commissioners that the Finance Department had discovered that the Treasury Department had sent roughly $300,000 meant for the Coos Forest Protection Association for wildland fire protection to the Oregon mobile home ombudsman.
“They weren’t that excited about giving $300,000 back, but they gave it back and we got it to the right place and we went on with our lives,” Fitzgerald said. “Then the treasurer’s department repeated the mistake last year as well.”
To correct the mistakes, Fitzgerald said the finance department needs to go through its books line by line to make sure the tax money was correctly distributed.
“If we have not delivered the correct amount of money to these various special districts, [which] we’re required to do by law, eventually at some point we’ll be answering for that,” he said. “I think it’s money well spent to get it right.”
Wolf said she’d help prepare the request for qualifications Trost asked for and said there are also in-house checks and balances the county can implement. She said she’s been working closely with Vicino, who succeeded Barnes as treasurer, to make sure things aren’t overlooked.
During Thursday’s discussion, Alcorn mentioned the property tax levy that he and his colleagues said would have funded a 24/7 sheriff’s office but was rejected by voters in the May 21 primary. He said he supported Trost’s proposal to conduct a forensic audit of the Treasury Department because it will increase the county’s transparency for the public.
“We are going to have to put funding options forward to the people to make decisions about, like we did for the past levy,” he said. “The more transparent information they have, the better decisions they can make.”
