ALBEMARLE — Thompson, Price, Scott, Adams and Company has presented Stanly County with a clean audit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024.
At the Stanly County Board of Commissioners meeting on Monday night, the board was given the county’s financial statements and audit report from Alan Thompson, a representative of the full-service accounting firm based in Whiteville, NC.
The audit includes the financial statements of governmental activities, business-type activities, the discretely presented component unit, each major fund, and the aggregate remaining fund information of the county for fiscal year 2023-2024.
“The main thing you hire us as an independent audit firm to do is issue an opinion on the financial statements as a whole,” Thompson said in his prelude to his firm’s report.
“We issued an unmodified report — which is a clean report — so congratulations on that,” he continued. “On page one, under qualitative aspects of accounting practices, there’s three paragraphs under that which talk about account appropriate accounting policies, accounting estimates, and disclosures in financial statements. We were fine with all of those. There were no difficulties encountered in performing the audit.”
Thompson added that there were no uncorrected misstatements or disagreements with management in the audit.
He went on to highlight key metrics, such as a general fund balance of $60.43 million — nearly double the amount back four years ago — and an unavailable fund balance of $9.97 million. The county’s previous general fund balance was $58.16 million.
The restricted and committed fund balance comes in at $13.64 million, while the general fund expenditures stands at $92.97 million. Elsewhere, the county’s fund balance available percentage is 54.27% and its property tax collection percentage is 98.44%.
“There are two or three items of note that we talked with management about,” Thompson said. “Just double check all the credit balances in accounts receiving, and make sure all those are appropriately taken care of. Make sure you track the leases and Subscription-Based IT Arrangements (SBITAs), both of which are new pronouncements. In your management of the county’s finances, you will probably not see any of that because it’s on government-wide financial statements, and it doesn’t impact the fund balance financial statements.”
Commissioner Peter Asciutto made a motion to approve the financial audit as presented, and a 7-0 vote soon followed.
“You did such a good job explaining this,” Chairman Bill Lawhon said.
The commissioners are set to hold their next regular meeting on Nov. 18 at 6 p.m. inside the Gene McIntyre Meeting Room at Stanly County Commons.