HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — After missing three deadlines, the City of Hendersonville might miss a fourth extension for its annual municipal audit required by the Tennessee Comptroller.
The deadline for the audit was on December 31, 2018, but the city missed that deadline and three other extensions. According to city officials, turnover and low staffing in the city's finance department is to blame.
The state audits are important because they serve as a measure of accountability and an assurance that tax dollars are being spent as they're intended. Also, without the audit, the Comptroller can't keep track of the city's fiscal health. A spokesperson for the comptroller's office, John Dunn, said the organization takes missing the audit deadline seriously.
However, Hendersonville Mayor Jamie Clary said what happened is out of the city's hands.
"We had a couple of people that retired and one person that moved to another position," said Clary. "We also hired a new person. So, it's just sort of a natural situation with people who moved on."
The mayor said the city has also placed a heavy load on the finance department in the past year and the audit took a back seat to city projects.
"It was sort of the perfect storm of so many things happened that we hadn't anticipated," said Clary. "Yeah, we do an audit every year, but we don't have three employees leave, we don't have so many firefighters that need to be hired and so many police officers that need to be hired. We also don't convert into electronic payroll. We had to do that by the end of the year as well."
The account of why the city missed the deadline is different depending on who's talking. City Alderman Scott Sprouse painted a very different picture of the city's problems.
"When we missed the deadline in December, that should've landed squarely on the mayor's desk," said Sprouse. "The time to take action to resolve this should not be three months after the problem. It should be as the original deadline approaches and as the original deadline was missed."
Sprouse also suggested the reason finance staff were leaving was because of the mayor's leadership.
The two also disagreed on whether the city will miss the March 31 audit deadline. Mayor Clary said the audit is near completion, but Sprouse said it looks like the city will miss it again.
The financial trouble stretches beyond the audit. The city also struggled to complete financial statements for city departments. Departments use those statements to balance their internal budget and didn't know whether they were going over budget, or had more money to spend.
"This for sure had an impact on our spending for the year, just like every other department in the city as each department was unaware just how much we had left in our operational budgets," said Hendersonville Fire Chief Scotty Bush.
Alderman Sprouse said all of these problems run deeper than a dispute between he and the mayor.
"I hope that people see that with the number of voices that are [speaking] about this problem, that it's not about politics. It's not about personalities, it's not about any sort of conflict and it's definitely not petty. It's about very important work that's not being done. It's about things that if they go undone, effects the city's ability to operate and even effects our bond rating," said Sprouse.
In a statement response to Alderman Sprouse's comments, the mayor said only two members of the city's staff are qualified to complete the audit. He said placing the blame only on the mayor is unfair because he is not qualified to work on it. He said to help with the problem, he's hired on temporary positions to complete the audit.
Even though having an audit that's delinquent is a serious issue, the comptroller's office currently has only 83 percent of the audits from municipalities across the state. Hendersonville is not the only city experiencing this problem.
