Chickasha accepts fiscal 2023 audit, auditor flags EMS deficit and control weaknesses

The Chickasha City Council on a voice/roll-call vote accepted the city's financial audit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023.

The city’s auditor, Andy Koromar, a CPA and shareholder with HSPG, told the council the auditors issued a “clean opinion” on the financial statements but raised several written comments and areas for improvement. “It's a clean opinion that says these numbers aren't materially correct, so that's what you're gonna wanna see whenever you hand it to somebody,” Koromar said during the presentation.

Koromar said the audit work is dated — covering two years earlier — and that the city’s EMS/ambulance fund carried a roughly $650,000 negative fund balance at year end. “State statute says, thou shall not have negative fund balances,” Koromar told the council, adding that the EMS deficit “needs to be addressed at some point.” He said the deficit largely remained steady through the audited year and noted the general fund helped cover operations during the year so the ambulance fund did not deepen its deficit further.

The auditor also reported repeated and carryover comments from the prior audit: weaknesses in segregation of duties and controls, problems reconciling water production to billed water usage (including meter conversion inconsistencies), and an internal practice allowing a single employee to obtain a bank cashier’s check that required only one signature. Koromar said those items had not been corrected as of the 2023 audit work and that some may have been addressed after 2023 but would not appear in the current report.

Koromar noted the city exceeded the federal single-audit threshold in 2023 because of COVID-related federal awards tied to ARPA, which required additional testing; the auditor said there were no grant compliance findings other than timeliness of the audit filing. He pointed to the state-required internal-control/compliance report at the back of the audit that includes four comments and a separate letter with additional management items, such as an unusually large number of bank accounts and stale (uncashed) checks totaling roughly $60,000.

Council members asked for clarification on timing and whether some recommendations had been implemented since the audit period. Koromar said the auditors had done no further audit testing on those items since 2023 and that corrective action would appear, if implemented, in later audits.

Ending: The council accepted the audit as presented. The auditor stressed the document is the official record the city will file with the state auditor and may be requested by bond underwriters. Council members and staff said they would follow up on the specific control items and the EMS deficit in future budget and audit cycles.