By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
Wednesday was a good day for the Barton County Commission, at least by the numbers. After the governing body approved its revenue-neutral 2023 budget, Adams Brown Senior Manager Melissa Ille gave the county a clean report on its 2021 audit. With only a few minor issues, Commissioner Jennifer Schartz commended the county for its accurate work.
"This is just one more level of transparency we're able to offer to the taxpayers," she said. "I'm really glad to have experts there to do it because this is way above my pay grade. I know there's a lot of trust between the commission and Adams Brown, and I really appreciate that working relationship. When you look at a $23 million budget, and this is all they could find, we're doing a really good job."
Ille said the Special Alcohol Fund went over budget by $219, but that was an accounting oversight related to the timing of a transfer. A more serious but still relatively minor error occurred within the health department's Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity (ELC) Program.
"We tested 20 employees for the ELC program," Ille told the commission. Of those 20, we had seven that had some slight, improper adjustments throughout the calculation of the payroll, whether they got paid a little bit extra or a little bit under. It could have been an allocation between the actual programs within the health department. You have many grant programs the employees work for so sometimes the allocation between the programs gets off a little bit."
Barton County Director of Operations Matt Patzner said the county legally cannot recoup those payments from employees, but with larger mistakes in the past, employees self-reported.
"We've had it in the past where if an employee, for instance, was paid twice or there was an error in the accounting system, where that employee has voluntarily given the money back before," he said. "This issue would have happened probably June, May, somewhere around there, and it wasn't discovered until we'd gone through the audit process, so months and months had gone by. The employee probably didn't even know there was an overpayment of overtime."
One error resulted in $1,053 in overpayment spread among seven employees. Another error was $1,027 spread among various grants. Extrapolated, Adams Browns estimated the errors could have been as large as $8,000. It was not known at Wednesday's meeting how the health department would rectify the mistakes.