External auditor issues clean opinion; council accepts Bloomington’s 2024 financial report

Andy Herring of Redpath and Company presented the city’s 2024 annual audit and told the council the auditor issued a clean, unmodified opinion on the financial statements and identified no internal control or Minnesota legal compliance findings.

“We issued five reports as part of the audit… an unmodified or clean opinion on the financial statements. There were no internal control findings, no legal compliance findings. We had four findings related to federal compliance,” Herring said.

Those four federal-compliance findings related to: (1) a missing verification step for suspended/debarred contractors on an ARPA contract (the sampled contractor was not debarred, but the required check was not documented); (2) errors on two HUD reports for the CDBG program that lacked a secondary review; (3) incomplete or missing environmental-review documentation for two of four tested CDBG projects; and (4) tenant-file checklists not consistently used in the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program. Herring said the errors were correctable and auditors found no instances of ineligible beneficiaries.

Finance staff and the Housing and Redevelopment Authority (HRA) told the council they had created corrective-action plans and taken steps to address the findings; staff agreed to publish the corrective-action plan with the meeting record. “There are corrective action plans for each finding that staff write,” a city staff member said.

Key financial figures presented: the general fund ended 2024 with a fund balance of $55.5 million. Herring said revenues exceeded budget (property taxes about $1.2 million over budget due primarily to collection of delinquent taxes; licenses and permits about $1.7 million over; and investment income about $1.5 million over) and expenditures were under budget, producing a net increase in fund balance rather than the budgeted drawdown.

Council action: Council adopted a motion to accept the City of Bloomington’s annual comprehensive financial report for calendar year 2024. Motion recorded as moved by Council Member D’Alessandro and seconded by Council Member Carter; the motion carried, 7–0.

Ending: Councilors asked staff to make the auditors’ corrective-action plan and any follow-up documentation available with the minutes. Staff said they would publish corrective actions to the extent those documents are public.