Wednesday, November 18, 2009

County: Employee repaid $33,776.23

Here's the surprising twist in Mecklenburg County's investigation into alleged misspending at a Christmas charity for children: Officials said a county employee returned more than $33,000 months ago, but auditors didn't account for it.

The county's audit department released this memo Tuesday.

Here's what officials say happened:

In June, county auditors released an audit of the Christmas program. It said they'd collected about $138,978 in receipts of about $162,000 at issue. Here is the first audit memo.

On Tuesday, the auditors released a "follow-up and clarification" to that audit.

It said an employee had returned $33,776.23 in February and March.

On Tuesday, Internal Audit Director Cornita Spears said an employee had been advanced the money and was returning what was unspent or that had been used for personal items.

- Doug Miller

2 comments:

Cedar Posts said...

Without a doubt, this is just the start, only the tip of the iceberg.

From what I'm hearing this type of funny book keeping is everywhere at CharMeck GovCo.

JAT said...

Are county employees reporting these interest free-loans to the IRS? At minimum they might be liable for the imputed gift of not having to pay the market interest rate for the use of these funds.

At $33K this blows past the $10K safe harbor limit for such loans and gets into really tricky tax code stuff.