by DAVID HAMILTON

The Natchez Democrat

NATCHEZ — With a Friday state deadline looming, Natchez officials say they expect the city’s fiscal year 2015-2016 audit to be completed late, as it has for the past several years.

Members of The Gillon Group, PLLC arrived Monday at City Hall to begin the process just days before the audit is due to the state auditor’s office.

“The (possibility) of it being finished in a week I just think it not very realistic,” Natchez Interim City Clerk Megan Edmonds said.

Edmonds said preparing for the audit has been a long, “grueling” process. The clerk’s office had to examine, Edmonds said, each of the more than 1,000 accounts in the city’s accounting system to seek out and correct discrepancies.

One of the most prevalent issues, Edmonds said, involved accounts that were incorrectly set up to rollover from one fiscal year to the next, which led to inaccurate balance reports.

“If you have asset accounts rolling over into expense accounts, then (the balances) will be off,” Edmonds said.

“I think we’ve ironed out all the wrinkles, and we’re ready to move forward.”

Although an overdue audit could lead to complications with state funding in some cases, Edmonds said she does not expect the city to suffer any “detrimental consequences” if the audit is not complete before Friday.

“Right now, I don’t think that it’s going to affect any of the grant applications that we have out there,” Edmonds said.

The last time the city submitted an audit report on time was 2011. Two years ago, the city did not submit fiscal year 2013-2014 records to Gillon until August 2016, 53 days after the finalized audit was due to the state. That audit ended up being several months late, going before the board of alderman for approval in March 2016.

Edmonds said the duration of this year’s audit would depend on what the auditor finds, but said she hopes that the office’s “due diligence” in preparing for the audit would speed up the process.

“We feel pretty good about what we’ve been able to do,” Edmonds said.

While Edmonds would not give a specific estimate of when the process would be complete, she said it would be done relatively early compared to years past.

“We’re not looking at September or October,” Edmonds said. “It will be done long before then.”