Local governments

Originally published October 2, 2024

Updated October 4, 2024

Fire districts, city police departments and county sheriff’s offices commonly have collective bargaining agreements that allow staff to exchange shifts or have shift fill-ins, as long as the shift exchange does not interfere with operations or incur additional costs.

The Port of Peninsula mismanaged its revenues, resulting in financial disarray, and failed to follow parts of the Open Public Meetings Act, the Office of the Washington State Auditor reported today.

The State Auditor’s Office has been closely monitoring actions concerning the Financial Data Transparency Act (FDTA), which was passed into law at the end of 2022. The act seeks to modernize the collection and dissemination of financial data by federal financial regulators by requiring information submitted to the agencies to be in a machine-readable format.    

The Office of the Washington State Auditor launched the Cyber Checkup program in 2023, and one common result we found from this program is that local governments lack or need to improve their information technology (IT) policies. 

The clerk-treasurer of a small city in the Cascades misappropriated more than $900,000 in public funds over nearly a decade, despite warning signs that improper activity was occurring, the Office of the Washington State Auditor found in a fraud report issued today.

Most governments own a variety of assets that they track and inventory, beyond what they do for financial reporting purposes. We call them small and attractive assets here in Washington state, but across the nation, people refer to them as theft-sensitive assets, walk-away assets or controlled assets.  

Our Office would like to thank every local government that filed its fiscal year 2023 annual report on time! This year, about 86 percent of local governments met the annual filing deadline (more than 1500 total), proving once again that compliance, accountability and transparency matter in Washington state.

Five years ago, the Office of the Washington State Auditor advised the town of Cusick that it had inadequate controls over its payroll and credit cards. Had the small government followed its audit recommendations then, it likely could have avoided more recent, and much larger, losses.  

It’s fairly common for local governments to use a collection agency in some capacity, such as to collect outstanding fees or fines that the government was unable to collect on its own. But how do you know if your collection agency is doing a good job? A collection agency acts on your behalf, collecting delinquent debts and remitting money back to you so you can use it in your operation.  

In this article, we will discuss tips on how to monitor your collection agency to evaluate its performance.