The Bainbridge City Council received an audit report for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2014 at Tuesday’s meeting.

Tammy Galvis, of Atlanta-area CPA firm Crace Galvis McGrath LLC., presented a few high points of the report, including the fact that the city’s total revenue was down almost $1 million from what it budgeted for.

“It’s extremely important to monitor those revenues throughout the year, so you can make adjustments to your expenditures as the year progresses,” Galvis said.
According to the report, almost $350,000 of the revenue loss was from taxes, and more than $250,000 of the loss was from intergovernmental revenue streams.

A financial statement finding in the report states that there were credit card charges made with city cards that were “not supported by complete documentation,” according to the report.

“We do have a significant deficiency that we’ve disclosed again this year, and it is similar to the deficiency that we disclosed last year relating to credit card transactions,” Galvis said. “I do know that a policy was put into place last year, and so when we did our testing, we specifically looked at the period after that policy had been put into place. We still did note that there were some deficiencies in documentation for business purposes, so we just recommend that be reviewed again.”

Galvis said that the city budgeted for the general fund to “break even,” preventing the need to dip into reserves.

“The actual, audited results were that expenditures exceeded revenues by $1 million dollars,” Galvis said, “so [the city] ended up pulling from reserves by $1 million.”