Government guarding against fraud

CASPER — To better guard against fraud in Wyoming’s small towns, the state recently established its first training requirements for officials on how to manage public funds.

The state Legislature in 2022 directed the Department of Audit to develop the new rules amid growing concerns about rogue communities evading compliance with financial regulations.

“This was kind of borne out of findings and things that were coming out of audits of local governments and special districts and smaller towns and cities,” said Department of Audit Public Funds Administrator Michael Hansen.

The requirements focus on the basics of public finance: what officials should and shouldn’t do with money, what kinds of internal controls government organizations are required to implement, what information they must report to the state and so on.

Not everyone who works a government job in Wyoming has to complete the training.

For one, the new law is geared primarily toward local government entities such as counties, municipalities and service districts. Even within those organizations, the requirements pertain only to governing bodies and employees tasked with handling the accounts of public office.

County treasurers, city councils and joint powers boards, for instance, would all fit the bill.

Moving forward, those officials will have to complete the training within a year of taking office. People who were already in office when the law took effect this summer have until July 2024.

Those who have educational backgrounds in financial management — like certified public accountants, or those who hold bachelor’s degrees in finance or accounting — can request to be exempted from the training.

The agency plans to offer training opportunities both in person and online.

According to the Department of Audit’s website, officials can also receive training through a handful professional organizations, including the Wyoming Association of Municipalities, Wyoming Association of Rural Water Systems, Wyoming Association of Conservation Districts and the University of Wyoming Extension’s Building Better Boards program.

What happens if public officers refuse to get trained? The new law authorizes the director of the Department of Audit to request that governing bodies increase supervision of non-compliant officials, or even remove them.

The training mandate is one of multiple tools to come out of the 2022 legislative session aimed at bringing local governments up to par with public finance regulations.

The same legislation that established the training also instructs state agencies to withhold funding from government organizations that don’t fulfill their financial reporting requirements. (There seems to be some confusion over what kind of money would be subject to that rule, however. In a June meeting, a panel of lawmakers asked the state Legislative Service Office to work with the Department of Audit to figure out ways the law could be clarified.)

In a separate law, legislators clarified that county officials must initiate the process to dissolve special service districts that fail to comply with certain state financial codes.

Many government officials across the state simply don’t have sufficient experience handling money, Justin Schilling, member services manager for the Wyoming Association of Municipalities, told lawmakers during the June meeting.

“A lot of your local officials are appointed,” he said. “They might not have a candidate for a particular ward seat, so a lot of people kind of get ‘voluntold’ into these positions.”

Another issue is Wyoming doesn’t have the resources to comprehensively audit smaller governments.

“Our six people are responsible for hundreds of entities,” Department of Audit Director Justin Chavez said during the meeting. “And so the reality is, the vast majority of those entities don’t get audited.”

While Wyoming communities with populations above 4,000 are required by state statute to pay for their own audits, small towns are not.

Communities used to be audited by the state at minimum every four years until budget cuts in the early 1990s forced the Department of Audit to downsize, the Star-Tribune reported in 2017. The agency in 2022 published reports for four small-town governments.

Chavez said the agency usually comes across three or four instances of potential financial crime a year.

But given the state’s limited ability to audit communities, Chavez said he suspects many financial crimes go unnoticed.

“That’s sort of the nature of fraud,” Chavez said. “If it’s concealed, there may be more than what we’re able to identify.”

Typically, the kinds of fraud he encounters could have been prevented if the organization had proper checks and balances in place, he said.

Chavez pointed to one case where a municipal clerk was responsible for “taking in money, recording it, doing the reconciliations and making the deposit.”

“No one else was looking at anything,” he said. “All it would have taken is a simple reconciliation between the accounting system and the bank account to say ‘Hey, money’s missing,’ but that person that was sneaking it was the one responsible for doing that.”

 By Mary Steurer

Casper Star-Tribune

Via Wyoming News Exchange