Lake County finance staff reported to county leaders that they are working to repair accounting and audit problems from 2021–2024 while modernizing systems so the county can close books monthly and speed reimbursements.

The changes are intended to make county financial records repeatable and accurate, officials said — enabling clearer budget decisions and faster federal and state reimbursements. "One of the big goals for anything financial or accounting based is repeatability," said Will, a finance staff member, during the briefing. He said the county is running parallel efforts to "fix what happened from about 2020 to 2024" while recording current transactions.

The work includes implementing Tyler, a municipal enterprise resource planning system, to manage positional budgeting, payroll deductions and accounts payable. "Tyler is more towards governments and municipalities, due to the specificness of fund requirements," Will said. Staff reported a recent project with Candace and IT staff member Liz to build correct payroll calculations for every position, allowing the county to project payroll costs into a five-year plan.

Officials described several measurable changes so far: a trained core group of roughly six county staff members using the ERP; a reduction in accounts-payable backlog from about a year to two weeks; payroll processing about a week faster than five months earlier; and projected annual savings on professional services for finance of about $150,000–$200,000. "We're closing the prior month as soon as the month end closes by about mid month the next month and have our reporting out the door," Candace, director of finance, said, describing the handoff from outside accounting help to in-house staff.

Staff said they must repair omissions in past records while keeping current operations running. Will cited one example tied to a fire station and said "approximately $2,000,000 of transactions were, not recorded," requiring retroactive entries that complicate the current audit. That parallel work, he said, amounts to doing "two audits at once."

County leaders discussed reducing reliance on outside accounting firms. Candace said the county has asked an accounting firm that historically helped end-of-year closings to work with the lead accountant monthly and train the in-house team until staff can perform the monthly close without outside assistance. "At this juncture, our accounting team is doing that themselves," Candace said, and "we will not be repaying for that work" going forward for the monthly close.

Officials emphasized cross-training to avoid single-person dependencies, and a plan to maintain separation of duties for controls. They said the change to monthly commercial closes should cut the need for expensive, end-of-year catch-up work and improve cash flow because federal and state reimbursements (for example, for human services) will be documented and submitted more promptly.

Board members expressed appreciation and concern about staff workload. One commissioner asked whether the current pace would cause burnout; staff said leadership is approving work–life balance measures and that cross-training helps maintain operations when employees take leave.

No formal motions or votes were made during this briefing. Staff described operational directions already taken — shifting month-end closings in-house, documenting standard operating procedures, training multiple staff members on positional budgeting and reducing contracted professional-service hours in the finance budget — but did not present binding policy changes requiring the board to adopt.

Officials said the modernization work will improve departmental visibility and budgeting: once data is clean and automated, commissioners and department heads will be able to see fund balances and program-level expenses without manually reconciling line by line. That visibility, staff said, should make it easier to explain trade-offs when the county must decline requests because of limited funds.

Looking ahead, staff said they expect the repair phase to continue through the current multi-year audit process but that monthly commercial closes and the ERP improvements will give the county clearer, faster financial reporting and recurring savings over time.