by Charlotte Burrous

March 8, 2022

As a guest speaker, resident Tim Jordan continued his campaign to bring corruption to an end in Florence during the Florence City Council on Monday.
“In hearing your report of a forensic audit, this is going to be kind of a touchy subject,” Jordan said. “I see you’ve reached out to Commissioner Debbie Bell, asking for assistance. A forensic audit has been asked for quite some time. … I find it kind of disturbing it took an outside reporter to come in and calculate stuff and come up that you are missing money. Other than that, whether it’s $10 or $10,000, and all the other stuff she’s found. What bothers me [is] it took her to come in here and find all this stuff in a short amount of time. My suggestion is to contact CBI, lock the door and do an investigation. I want to know where every penny has (gone). I want every record that’s gone out of here — all of it. If [the reporter] would not have done this, we would not have found out about the wage advances. We would not have found out about the money that [is] still owed.”
At that point, Interim City Manager Tom Piltingsrud said he spoke to the current County Administrator and former Florence Finance Officer Sunny Barnes about a forensic audit. ”
“It is an audit, looking for criminal activity,” Piltingsrud said. “Such an audit is only done by specialized firms and that it would cost up to at least three times the amount we’ve already budgeted for our annual audit, which will begin March 28th.”
So the annual auditor is going to begin that day, he added. In the meantime, a forensic is hanging over the city’s head.
“We have not budgeted $60,000 plus for a forensic audit,” Piltingsrud continued. “We have a person to do our annual audit so in talking with Sunny, I suggested to her an idea to conduct a more involved audit, but fall short of a forensic audit. That audit would would look at (the financials). Sunny has agreed to do that.”
Certain funds would be more susceptible to “hanky panky,” than others, he added.
“I did talk to the auditor who is coming down the 28th and suggest to her that she look at our financials as a lead-in to our audit to give us an indication of whether there might be really something to look at or not,” Piltingsrud said. “She has agreed to do that so she’s going to come down one or two days earlier. We will have to expand the scope of work she is going to conduct. It’s going to cost us a little more money to have her do this, but I think that will give us a little better snapshot through our audit of the state of our finances and that is the way I would like to approach this audit. Remember we do not have $60,000 budgeted for a forensic audit. If something turns up, then we go to a forensic audit. We do a scope of work and figure out where we’re going to find the money. Let’s look at this in increments instead of whole hog forensic because we already have an audit planned.”
When Councilor Allan Knisley asked why hadn’t previous auditors found the discrepancies, Piltingsrud noted one of them had found the wage advances in 2017 and wrote a manager’s report
on it.
“That’s something that was never in front of our eyes,” Knisley replied. “We pay an auditor a lot of money to say these books are correct so we expect to believe that those books were correct.”
Piltingsrud said they were correct except for the wage advances.
At that point, Councilor Bryan Allan said he had reached out to CBI, but he was told the police department would have to contact CBI to request an investigation.
“I’d like to direct our police department to please contact CBI and bring them in to see some of these documentations so we can see what’s wrong,” he said.
When Allan asked Police Chief Sean Prickett if he would contact CBI, Prickett said he had talked to them before. “If you have something I can specifically tell them, I don’t know why they wouldn’t be able to do that,” Prickett said.
Allan said he wanted them to check into the loans with taxpayers’ money that was not approved by city council and some other issues.
“Absolutely,” Prickett said. “I’ll get with Tom (Piltingsrud)
tomorrow and we’ll reach out.