Mayor Quordiniah Lockley on Tuesday night updated McComb selectmen on problems with city hall staff’s financial reporting to the board. But one selectman remained skeptical, asking, “What else is not correct?”
As he previously told the Enterprise-Journal, Lockley said two different dockets were being added together before the data was presented to the board for action to pay the city’s bills.
In addition to the accounts payable docket, which contains bills coming due, the city also has what he called a manual docket, which includes bills to be paid and bills already paid. The lines for bills already paid on the manual have extra information like check numbers that show the bills were paid.
The dockets were added together because City Clerk Rosezea Scott “was trained in-house to do it that way,” Lockley said. “Other staff were trained in-house to do it that way. It shouldn’t have been done that way.”
He said that practice had occurred since at least 2018, and “I don’t know how far back it goes.”
Lockley had already told the Enterprise-Journal that, while adding the dockets together resulted in items being counted twice, no bills had been paid twice.
None of the board members said much about the situation during the meeting, but Selectman Tommy McKenzie did afterward.
“We learned from the mayor, the financial data being presented to the board has been incorrect since 2018,” McKenzie said. “What else is not correct? Where else should we be looking?
“It’s very scary moving forward, considering that City Hall is presenting a new budget that is $1.5 million more without a realistic plan to pay for the increase.”
Lockley said Wednesday that audits of 2018 and 2019 financial information resulted in no irregularities or findings of fault in the city’s books, and he is confident the audits for 2020 to 2022 will show the same.
“I was clear in the budget work session. I did not bite my tongue,” Lockley said of next’s year’s revenue and spending plan. “Never in over 30 years have our revenues gone up over $1 million. $1.5 million is stretching it for me.
“Everybody on the board knows (City Administrator David) Myers’s task is to present a balanced budget. If change is needed, we have the right to change it before it is adopted.”
The mayor said the city’s procedures now are essentially the same as when McKenzie served two terms from 2010 to 2018, and that he never questioned the procedures or their result during that time.
“Every avenue that Selectman McKenzie has pointed out as looking wrong, has been explained,” Lockley said. “That he refuses to accept it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. There’s a laundry list of things he has complained about that when they were explained, they were not wrong. Explanations are not excuses.”
