An audit of the city of Camas’ finances released by the Washington State Auditor’s office found the city’s internal controls to be inadequate. According to the state’s findings, which were released Sept. 5, Camas in 2023 “did not have sufficient internal controls over the preparation of its financial statements which resulted in several errors.”
The audit found the city’s debit/credit journal entries were not detailed enough to ensure they were complete and accurate. Additionally, the state said Camas’ process for preparing financial statements was insufficient. The city’s process for reporting capital assets on its financial statements was also lacking, according to the audit.
“The city did not have a process for ensuring it accurately reported capital assets and donated capital contributions on its financial statements. Specifically, the city did not evaluate and adjust useful lives of capital assets, did not remove assets no longer in service, and added capital contributions before they were donated to the city,” the audit stated.
Camas officials have identified where the deficiencies originated and are working to address the issues. Cathy Huber Nickerson, finance director for the city, said the issues stemmed from outdated software, which the city is already working to address.
In 2022, the city purchased a new system that is slowly being rolled out.
“It was a three-year project with five modules. Two of the modules that are important to the (audit) findings is the asset management, as well as the capital asset module,” Huber Nickerson said, adding that the state has long been aware of the city’s issues with its software.
Huber Nickerson said the city’s current system wasn’t able to do the work needed, which meant staff would have to manually enter and track data.
“This process has the potential for data input errors and review can be challenging. The efficiency and automation of the system is intended to preclude errors the city has experienced in the last two years,” the audit report said.
“We’ve been trying to mitigate it as much as we could,” Huber Nickerson added.
The new software will let staff load electronic files directly into the modules from either a spreadsheet or geographic file, rather than staff having to enter the data into a spreadsheet manually.
“We’re implementing it right now. We go live with it the first week of December,” she said. “We fully expect that it will address all the issues the state auditors have had.”
Huber Nickerson said the state’s findings don’t mean the city isn’t tracking its assets or spending taxpayer money unwisely.
“This is more of a technical finding than one that impacts the public,” she said.
