YELLOW SHEET Office of the State Auditor of Missouri Claire McCaskill

October 27, 1999
Report No. 99-100

IMPORTANT: The Missouri State Auditor is required by Missouri law to conduct audits only once every four years in counties, like Maries, which do not have a county auditor. However, to assist such counties in meeting federal audit requirements, the State Auditor will also perform a financial and compliance audit of various county operating funds every two years. This voluntary service to Missouri counties can only be provided when state auditing resources are available and does not interfere with the State Auditor's constitutional responsibility of auditing state government.

Once every four years, the State Auditor's statutory audit will cover additional areas of county operations, as well as the elected county officials, as required by Missouri's Constitution.

This audit of Maries County was a financial and compliance audit of various county operating funds. The following concerns were noted as part of the audit:

As noted in our prior two reports, the county has not sufficiently reduced its property tax revenues by 50 percent of the sales tax revenues as provided in the ballot issue passed by Maries County voters.

While the rollback for 1997 was insufficient as compared to that year's sales tax collections, the rollback for 1998 was sufficient for that year and also resulted in some reduction in the balance of prior years' excess property tax revenue collections. Additional reductions will need to be made in future years to offset the balance of prior years' excess property tax revenue collections.

In November 1996, Maries County voters passed a one-half cent sales tax for the purpose of renovating the courthouse. The county entered into a contract for courthouse renovations at a cost of $564,762. Ten amendments, or change orders, to the original contract, totaling approximately $99,000, were apparently necessary for a variety of reasons including, bid specification inaccuracies and omissions, unanticipated problems, and additional work the county desired to have completed once the project was underway. Most of the change orders in the county's files were not signed by the county or the contractor and the work related to several change orders was completed before the change order was prepared and authorized. The county's overall documentation related to project change orders was not adequate.

While the County Commission agreed about the documentation, they indicated they did discuss and were aware of the work required by the change orders and they monitored the work throughout the course of the project.

The audit also includes some other matters upon which the county should consider and take appropriate corrective action.

Complete Audit Report