The Brown County Council met via a telephone conference on March 30 to approve a recommendation from the State Board of Accounts that would help balance the books in the treasurer’s and auditor’s offices.

Council President Dave Redding explained that he was advised by Indiana Public Access Counselor Luke Britt to have the council only “take care of critically important, urgent, timely topics and limit our use of this mechanism, this protocol for that purpose.”

One of the requests the council approved was from the treasurer and auditor, who had been recommended by the State Board of Accounts to write off $7,477.47 to balance books between their offices and the bank. The books are being balanced as the county switches to a new financial system.

The council also approved an additional appropriation of $2,697.60 from the general fund to the county’s payroll fund to make sure that fund matches what the treasurer and the bank have on file.

“For many years, there had been some issues and things did not balance between the two offices,” Auditor Julie Reeves explained.

Former Auditor Beth Mulry and Treasurer Mary Smith worked to find where the missing money had gone between the two funds, ultimately bringing down the discrepancy between the two offices’ books to $7,477.47.

“It was missing from the auditor’s office. We were showing that much more than the treasurer and the bank. Now, we balance daily and we make sure that everything is good for the day,” Reeves said.

“The auditor’s office will be writing off the $7,000 to balance it with the treasurer and the bank, so we’ll all be even in the long run. … It would cost us more money than what the actual cost is to spend the time trying to find $7,000 and odd dollars.”

“We run a report every day to make sure that whatever increases or decreases that happened in the funds ledger for the day were recorded in both offices for checks and balances,” Smith said in an email last week.

She added that there had been confusion many years ago about how manual changes are done in the funds in each office.

“The funds balance on paper was out of sync. It isn’t actual money, just money on paper,” Smith said.

She described it as “a learning curve, because when the problems started, we were dealing with a lot of new procedures, such as wire transfers and online bank withdrawals, that had not been part of our daily tasks in the past,” she said.

“It was just an issue with catching our daily operations up with changing technology practices. After we realized what we needed to do, we were able to put guidelines in place to make sure the issues didn’t happen again.”