After struggling for nearly three years to get Lawton’s financial ledgers updated, the audit for Fiscal Year 2024 has been completed and filed with the State Auditor and Inspector.
The public accounting firm of Forvis- Mazars of Rogers, Arkansas, was engaged to help complete the audit of the City of Lawton’s financial statements for FY 2023-24.
The accountants reported that on June 30 last year, the city’s total net position increased by $23.1 million, or almost 7% from FY23.
During FY24 the city’s expenses for governmental activities were $115.9 million and were funded by program revenues of $19 million plus taxes and other general revenues totaling $113.3 million.
In the city’s “business-type” activities, such as utilities, program revenues exceeded expenses by $20.7 million.
“Net position may serve over time as a useful indicator of a government’s financial position,” Forvis- Mazars accountants wrote in their report presented to the City Council on April 8. In Lawton’s case, “assets and deferred outflows of resources exceeded liabilities and deferred inflows of resources by $414.2 million at the close” of FY24 on June 30, 2024.
The lone deficiency cited by the auditors was that current processes and procedures “may not effectively limit duties to minimize risks associated with adequate segregation of duties.”
That issue “will not appear” in the FY 2025 audit, Finance Director Rebecca Johnson assured the City Council The city’s new financial accounting software “will further allow the segregation of duties,” Forvis-Mazars confirmed.
“We’re excited to be caught up,” Mayor Stan Booker told Johnson.
The FY25 audit is expected to be completed on or before the year-end deadline. “We anticipate it being the first timely report the City of Lawton has had since filing went electronic in 2011,” Communications Manager Caitlin Gatlin told Southwest Ledger in late January.
Lawton’s FY24 audit was received by the State Auditor’s office on April 3. The FY24 audit was approximately three and a half months late, but that was a vast improvement over recent history.
The City of Lawton changed banks and switched to a different accounting software system in 2022, which caused numerous problems in completing the audits for Fiscal Years 2022 and 2023.
The city’s FY22 audit was completed and submitted to the SA&I last June, a year and a half after its due date of Dec. 31, 2022. Similarly, the FY23 audit was finished and filed with the state in December 2024, a year late.
State law provides that a municipality’s audit of its fiscal year finances should be completed within 180 days from the end of that calendar year: i.e., Dec. 31 of that particular year.