State audit finds issues in county

Three Chickasaw County departments were “dinged” by a special audit conducted by the state of Iowa, but county officials said many of the issues found in the audit released last week have already been resolved.

Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand released the report on Friday, and he wrote that the findings addressed issues ranging from commingling private non-profit Chickasaw Rescue Association funds with county Rescue Squad funds to the lack of signatures of Board of Health minutes to questionable and unsupported disbursements to the free use of county-owned land in violation of state law.
The Board of Supervisors is expected to discuss the audit today (Tuesday), but county officials say they have taken steps to rectify the issues Sand and his auditors found.
“Once we learned that we weren’t doing things the way we were supposed to,” Chickasaw County Public Health and Homecare Services Administrator Lisa Welter said, “we changed our procedures to make sure we were following proper guidelines. A lot of the things in the report were taken care of a year, even two years ago.”
The audit of the three departments — Emergency Management Association, Public Health and the Conservation Board — dealt with issues that occurred between July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2019.
— For more on this story, see the Feb. 16 Tribune or the Feb. 18 Reporter