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Dunn County board reviews revamped voucher reports, seeks clearer totals and privacy fixes
Summary
Finance staff showed two voucher-report formats: one with a business-purpose description and a second redacted view that omits vendor names for foster/kinship payments. Supervisors asked for clearer bottom-line totals, revenue breakdowns by program and tighter redaction procedures to avoid confidentiality breaches.
Britney, a finance staff member asked to present by Chair Diane Morehouse, walked the Health and Human Services Board through two new voucher-report formats the county will use going forward. One report includes a new "description" column that explains the business purpose of purchases; a second, more-redacted report removes vendor names for foster and kinship payments to protect client confidentiality. Britney said staff will work to add summary totals and provide department-sorted views in BS&A. She told the board the vendor-name redaction was intended to protect foster-family privacy and that any inadvertent confidential detail in a description "we can redact that or I can try to change it before we print off the form."
Board members welcomed the focus on confidentiality but pressed for clearer financial snapshots. Dr. Alex Hall said he missed seeing salary encumbrances and other familiar lines, asking whether the new formats would let supervisors judge the department's bottom-line position. Britney and other staff replied that salary lines were excluded by design for standing committees to avoid unwieldy 100-page voucher packets; Brittany offered a summarized option that would show salary versus operating totals and promised to work on adding projected totals and clearer grant/revenue mapping.
Members also questioned how foster-care items appear in the new layout. Britney explained that foster-care payments are entered with a confidential vendor name in the detailed report and that the foster report shows color-coded entries where each color marks a different foster parent; the redacted report will hide vendor names but keep invoice-level clarity. Paula Winter, the county's Director of Human Services, confirmed staff will attempt to remove any personally identifying information in descriptions before printing and said the department will flag any lingering confidentiality issues for immediate correction.
The board asked for several follow-ups: totals and summarized views (salary vs. operating), clearer revenue breakdowns linking fees and grants to programs, and a visual cue in reports to mark mandated services versus discretionary programs. Britney said she will work with Paula and the county's BS&A vendor to add department sorting and conservative AR (accounts receivable) entries to reflect likely reimbursements, and she said auditors are on site soon to help reconcile January and February activity with the new system.
The item ended as a staff-to-supervisor action: finance staff will deliver a simplified, bottom-line financial view and an updated redacted voucher report for the board's review at the next meeting.
