The recent audit of the town of Melville found some problems.
The town was singled out for mention in the weekly email of the Louisiana Legislative Auditor.
Here's the LLA summary of the report, which you can read yourself by scrolling down:
The independent auditor did not express an opinion on the Town’s financial statements because of the lack of sufficient appropriate audit evidence. The audit report had 12 findings, nine of which were repeated from the previous year.
The auditor found the Town lacked adequate policies and procedures for its accounting practices, lacked policies and procedures to maintain a comprehensive list of capital assets, did not pay all required payroll taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and the Louisiana Department of Revenue, and lacked adequate records to reconcile its meter deposit liability to individual account balances.
In addition, the Town did not enforce a uniform utility cutoff policy for customers who failed to pay their bills and had a large number of substantial past-due accounts, including for some elected officials. The Town also was unable to produce written minutes of meetings for a large part of the year and did not comply with its debt covenant requirements.
Additionally, the Town paid salaries to elected officials but was unable to produce the ordinance that set those salaries, and failed to remit certain fines, fees, and court costs to various entities each month as required by law. The auditor found, too, that the Town did not file its annual financial report with the Legislative Auditor’s office in a timely manner, failed to amend its budget when unfavorable variances exceeded 5% as required by law, and failed to consistently bill utility customers.
In the audit report, the town's administration responds to each of the findings, many of them referring to problems "inherited" from the previous administration. The former mayor, Velma Hendrix, was running for re-election in November 2022 when she died in a car crash. The audit is of the town's finances for the fiscal year that ended September 30, 2023.
In the management response, the current administration mentioned a number of new processes to address the issues the auditors found. Some of the problems should be complete before this year's audit is done, they say.
For instance, they are planning to train accounting personnel, got a grant to cover some utility shortfalls, set up a tickler system so that bond-related accounting is done on time, started a list of assets and are working on ordinances setting elected official pay.
Here's the full audit:
