Lifetime Citizen Portal Access — AI Briefings, Alerts & Unlimited Follows
Holyoke officials report progress on multi‑year reconciliations, call audit work "time consuming"
Loading...
Summary
City finance staff and outside auditors told the Finance Subcommittee they have reconciled FY2023 treasurer records to bank statements and are advancing work on FY2024–FY2025; staff described legacy issues (wires not on warrants, avoided checks, multiple GL systems) and automation steps being introduced in Munis.
City officials and outside consultants told the Holyoke City Council Finance Subcommittee that substantial progress is being made reconciling three years of city cash accounts, but the work remains time‑consuming and technical.
A written update from Clifton Larson Allen LLP, read into the record, said CLA’s work covers fiscal years 2023 through 2025 and that reconciliation of the treasurer’s cash book to bank statements for fiscal 2023 has been completed and turned over to the city’s external auditors. The memo also flagged thousands of reconciling items and the need for template and process improvements.
Finance staff and advisers described common causes of discrepancies: "Over 2,000 lines of reconciling items between the treasurer's cash book and the bank," including roughly $15,000,000 in wire transfers that cleared banks but were not on vendor warrants, and about $790,000 in avoided or one‑sided checks, the team said.
TJ Plant and Rory Casey said the problems stemmed from legacy, manual processes — handwritten checks, multiple general‑ledger systems for city, schools and gas & electric, and inconsistent clearing of Munis entries — and described steps taken this year to automate and simplify workflows. Casey said consolidating bank accounts was a priority and cited a plan to reduce roughly 67 bank accounts down toward a core set of active accounts to simplify reconciliation.
Kelly Curran, who presented an update on recruitment tied to the Municipal Modernization Act, said staffing challenges affected the pace of work. "I learned that we don't pay enough," Curran said, describing agencies' feedback when recruiting for financial positions and noting the city engaged staffing agencies for hard‑to‑fill posts.
Officials told the committee FY2023 free cash has been certified (about $1 million) and that CLA is now focused on FY2024 work; external auditors (CBIZ) were reviewing documents and had paused final issuance pending internal quality review and staff availability. Staff said they expect more substantial movement on FY2024 and FY2025 reconciliations in the next 3–4 weeks and recommended returning to the committee with an update at the next finance meeting.
Next steps: staff will continue reconciliation work with CLA and CBIZ, schedule further updates for the finance committee, and proceed with recruitment and onboarding of positions created under the Municipal Modernization Act.
