Lincoln County entities' audits look clean

• Government Accountability Office established to inform public

Public entities in Lincoln County fared well in a report on audit compliance released by New Mexico State Auditor Timothy M. Keller this week.

The towns of Carrizozo, Capitan and Ruidoso Downs, the 12th Judicial District Attorney, the 12th Judicial District Court, the Upper Hondo Soil and Water Conservation District, Eastern New Mexico University and Greentree Solid Waste Authority all received clean recent audits with no findings and an unmodified opinion. That type of opinion means the auditor concluded the financial statements of an entity were presented fairly in all material respects in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

The village of Ruidoso received seven findings, but also an unmodified opinion, the town of Corona received one and Lincoln County received four. The school districts of Corona and Capitan had no findings, the Carrizozo School District received three, the Hondo district, one, and the Ruidoso School District, seven, all with unmodified opinions. The Region IX Education Cooperative was hit with nine findings, but again, an unmodified opinion.

Overall, the county's public bodies performed well. Ruidoso continues to improve each year after suffering some major audit setbacks more than a decade ago.

In the executive summary of his report, Keller wrote that 94 percent of the 449 state and local governmental entities audited received “unmodified” opinions. With regard to findings, 26 percent of all entities had no findings at all, meaning that the auditor found that the entity had a clean bill of health.

On the less positive side, Keller wrote that the entities with findings had 2,033 total findings among them. The frequency and severity of findings across governmental entities suggest that a few especially financially challenged entities are in dire need of improvement, he wrote.

"The objective of this report is to bring purpose, transparency, and accountability to those aspects of the financial operations of state and local governmental entities that are examined within the agencies’ annual financial audits," Keller wrote in the summary. "This report is the first in a series, with subsequent volumes to follow annually, which will provide comparative data and enable the public to track corrective action on a year-to-year basis."

The New Mexico State Auditor established the Government Accountability Office to inform and report to the public statewide issues relating to the use of public funds. The GAO is a key step towards fulfilling the Office of the State Auditor’s constitutional mandate to bring transparency and accountability to the use of public funds, according to the summary.

"New Mexico can be proud that the vast majority of our state and local governments are accounting for public dollars in a transparent and reliable manner," Keller said in a news release about the report.

Among the highlights in the report, he cited that five state agencies received "qualified" audit opinions, meaning there are material misstatements or possibly undetected misstatements in the financial statements. The agencies are the Corrections Department, Education Trust Board of New Mexico (administrative fund), General Services Department, Office of the Secretary of State and the Regulation and Licensing Department. He pointed out that more than 2,000 findings were cited across audited entities, of which about half represented significant issues or problems. Those entities included the city of Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Public Schools and the Santa Fe Public Schools.

Nearly half of all audit findings were repeated from a previous year, he noted. That  "indicates a need for those entities to focus on corrective action plans to ensure the weaknesses are addressed," he wrote.

The report and supporting data are available at http://osanm.org/government_­accountibility_­office.