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During the Troup County Board of Commissioners work session on Tuesday morning, the county received a presentation on its annual audit for 2024.

Meredith Lipson, of Mauldin & Jenkins, gave an abridged overview of the 550-page audit. Lipson provided an overall summary of the audit process itself, including any findings and recommendations that came out of the audit and recommendations for changes to implement in future years. 

“Fortunately, there is not right now, any that are really significant to the financial reporting going forward, we’ve had some lately, past few years that have just been headaches,” Lipson said. 

“There’s a lot of information included. The county has chosen, for a number of years, to go above and beyond what the state requires.”

The audit statements include government-wide statements and fund financial statements. Government-wide statements take into account the government as a whole, including capital, assets and debts. Financial statements are more specific to different areas within the government.

The county’s government-wide financial statements as of June 30, 2024, had approximately $245.4 million in assets offset by liabilities of $50.4 million resulting in an equity position of approximately $194.9 million.

“Revenues for all five of the past fiscal years have been in excess of your expenditures, which is fantastic. That doesn’t always happen. We don’t always see that,” Lipson said.

The county had a $7.7 million excess of revenues over expenditures in Fiscal Year 24, primarily in property taxes, as well as lower-than-expected expenditures in nearly about every department. 

The fund balance as of June 30, 2024, showed what Lipson described as a good, strong fund balance of approximately $35 million.

“That reflects approximately nine months of expenditures, which is very strong. That means that any unusual activity you all could probably go nine months until you start getting into your main revenue sources in the fall of each year,” she said.

The audit did note that the issue of funds not being disbursed from the Clerk of Courts office before June 30, 2024. The county recently approved a part-time clerk position to help Clerk of Court Jackie Taylor with the backlog. 

“[There has been] very slow progress,” County Manager Eric Mosley said. “I believe she’s fully staffed at this point … she has made some improvement, I would agree that office and certainly the management appears that have been improved.  I applaud her for that. Hopefully, we can continue to find ways to accumulate those funds from previous years.

“The audit was much better this year than it was last year. That is great. I just that, I mean, these funds are from previous years. It just looks like there’s, we ought to come to some kind of timeline if we could expect to receive those funds. I’m not sure if we even know how much money there is,” Commission Chair Patrick Crews said.

“She has been hesitant to declare how much belongs to Troup County, because the amount of those that she has has to be dispersed to other agencies as well and so, but it’s in the several $100,000 range. That just a guess. She has been consistently going through those funds monthly and sending out an allocation of those funds to try to bring that amount down. It’s just taking her some time to reconcile everything and disperse it,” Troup CFO Sonya Conroy said.

Lipson said explained the funds in question are court fines.

“That activity is all maintained within one bank account. Everything that comes in has to go out,” Lipson said. “Whatever the balance is in that account has to be dispersed to the county and various other entities.”