LAWTON –The municipal Finance Department can see light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
The long-awaited audit of the city’s books from Fiscal Year 2022 will be finished by March 31 and submitted to the City Council at its April 9 meeting, Finance Director Joe Don Dunham predicted.
Crawford & Associates, consultants from Oklahoma City, “passed along all of our 2022 financial data” to auditors from the Forvis accounting firm, also from Oklahoma City.
“That has enabled us to move forward on the 2023 audit,” Dunham said. “We are doing our reconciliations and are moving forward as quickly as possible.”
The city’s FY 2023 audit was originally estimated to be completed by the end of February. However, that deadline was not met “because we did not have journal entries in yet.” Accordingly, the new estimated date for “getting our stuff to the consultants” is April 30. Dunham predicted that he would present the City Council with a completed FY 2023 audit by June 30.
In response to a question, Dunham assured the council that, “I am involved daily” in the preparation of the audits.
The city’s annual audit is due by the end of each calendar year. Thus, the Fiscal Year 2022 audit should have been finished by Dec. 31, 2022, and the audit for FY ’23 was due by the end of last year.
However, the city changed banks and switched to a different accounting software system in 2022, which caused numerous problems in completing the audits for both of those years.
Consequently, the FY’22 audit is 14 months overdue and the FY’23 audit is two months past due.
With the FY’22 and FY ’23 audits finally nearing completion, Mayor Stan Booker urged the Finance Department to have the city’s audit for FY 2024 (which ends June 30 this year) to be completed by year’s end.
Dunham previously told the council that meeting the Dec. 31 deadline would be difficult but not impossible. “It’s a challenge Lawton has not met in the past, but it can be done,” he said.