Lauderdale County’s financial picture is looking bright, according to a draft of the fiscal year 2024 audit. County officials met Friday with representatives from the Mississippi State Auditor’s office to review the audit results and discuss the county’s financial picture.
Beth Stuart from the State Auditor’s office said the best opinion a county can get on an audit is “unmodified,” and Lauderdale County reached that level on all but one metrics the audit measured. That includes an audit of federal dollars spent as part of the American Rescue Plan Act funds, she said.
“If the county has over $750,000 of federal expenditures in a given fiscal year, then we have to audit that,” she said.
The metric not found to be unmodified isn’t due to any error but instead because the county doesn’t include Lauderdale County Tourism and Meridian-Lauderdale County Public Library in its financial reports. Stuart said the finding is due to that lack of data, not anything the county did wrong.
In fiscal year 2024, Lauderdale County spent $6.5 million in federal funding, Stuart said, with the majority coming from pandemic-era stimulus money.
“We didn’t have any findings or anything there, so it was unmodified, the best you can do,” she said.
Also raising no concerns were the county’s use of emergency and sole source purchases.
Emergency purchases are allowed when going through the usual procurement process, which usually takes several weeks, isn’t feasible. Broken pipes or HVAC systems, storm damage and other similar, unplanned incidents are examples of situations where emergency purchases can be needed.
Sole source purchases are made when the county needs specific equipment only available through one vendor, such as body and vehicle dash cameras for the Sheriff’s Department or proprietary parts for large machines at the Road Department.
One area of improvement identified by auditors was the need for proper bonding. Several county positions required to be bonded were either not bonded or rolled together under blanket bonds.
Supervisors, clerks and other county positions are required to have surety bonds, which act as a kind of insurance for taxpayers against wrongdoing. In the event of fraud or other misuse of public money, the bond protects both the county and taxpayers from losing their money.
County Financial Analyst Kaylee Ward said it’s likely an issue with the paperwork and not the actual bonds. In years past, bond confirmation documents have gone to individuals’ homes instead of the courthouse, creating a situation where a county employee is properly bonded but records are incomplete.
“There may be a few that aren’t actually bonded, but most of them are,” she said.
Auditors said the insurance company that issued the bonds should be able to confirm who is and isn’t bonded. Once the proper paperwork is filed, those findings will be resolved.
County Administrator Chris Lafferty said the county can work toward having all bonding documentation sent to the courthouse so that it can be filed properly going forward.
“Maybe moving forward our practice is no matter what we have them mailed here,” he said.
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