Town of Braintree Vermont

Auditor Minutes – October 8, 2018

Town of Braintree

Draft Auditors Meeting Minutes

October 8, 2018

 

Attendees:  Tom Cooch, Stephanie Barrett, Lin Brown

 

  1. Mr. Cooch called the meeting to order at 9:10 a.m.

 

  1. No changes were made to the agenda.

 

  1. The minutes of the June 4, 2018 meeting were approved.

 

  1. Review work completed for FY19.

– General and Reserve Funds: Complete through FY18-Q4. Mr. Cooch reported that an end of year reallocation of interest may be required prior to doing the FY19-Q1 audit. Mr Cooch will ask the Town Administrator for clarification on the extent to which these Funds are operating funds.

 

– Accounts Payable: Done through FY18-Q3. Ms. Barrett will complete the audit for FY18-Q4 and do FY19-Q1.

 

– Payroll: Complete through FY18-Q4. Mr. Brown has updated the Employee List for FY19 and will do the FY19-Q1 audit.

 

– Grand List: Done annually at the end of Q2. OK for now.

 

– General Journal: Complete through FY18-Q4. Mr. Cooch will do the FY19-Q1 audit.

 

– State Payments: Done semi-annually. Complete through FY18-Q4.  Mr Brown will do the next one for FY19-Q1&Q2.

 

– Cash Receipts: In progress.  See discussion in section 5.a below.

  1. Audit Procedure Manuals.
  2. Cash

Mr. Cooch reported that attempting to match all the cash receipts with Town Clerk logs and bank deposits has been extremely tedious. Ms. Barrett suggested that because most of the transactions are small (about 50% are $10 or under) and it may be more effective to focus our audit attention on only the large transactions.  The data for FY18-Q3 & Q4 show that the largest 20% of the transactions (those of about $100 or more), comprise over 90% of the total cash receipts.  Further work on this procedure was tabled until our next meeting.

  1. State Payments

Mr. Cooch reported using the draft procedure for reconciling payments from the State of Vermont to the Town to do the FY18-Q3&Q4 audit. It worked well and he recommended that it be approved. It was unanimously voted to approve the procedure for future use.

 

  1. Taxes

Mr. Brown reported on progress for a two part procedure for auditing income from taxes. The part for verifying the process by which the tax rate is set is nearly complete. The part for checking that tax bills are generated correctly and that tax receipts are properly recorded and deposited are yet to be done.

 

  1. Other business

The audit responsibilities assigned to each individual auditor were reviewed.  No changes were made.

 

  1. Our next meeting will be scheduled at a convenient time in January 2019.

 

  1. The meeting was adjourned at 10:26 a.m.

 

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

Linfield C. Brown