Audit finds Visit Jacksonville payroll, reimbursements lacked supporting documentation

Jacksonville, FL — Jacksonville’s official tourism and marketing organization is facing questions over some lax paperwork and filing- and the impact that has on accounting for your tax dollars.

A new payroll and reimbursements audit of Visit Jacksonville conducted by the Council Auditor’s Office shows several recommendations and areas of improvement for the organization, many of them tracing to bookkeeping and financial authorization.

“Overall, we found that payroll and other employee payments were made to legitimate employees and were generally accurate in amount. However, we found issues related to payment supporting documentation and authorization,” the audit report says.

The audit couldn’t find adequate support for $22,474.24 in payroll, because of insufficient documentation on time off requests, pay rates, and similar areas. As an example, auditors found 39 payments for cell phone allowances in the time studied, but in 69% of those cases, they couldn’t find documents to support the employee was entitled to a cell phone allowance at all.

Another area of missing documentation deals with the organization’s incentives program. Auditors found payments, but not documents detailing the goals of the program, meaning they couldn’t verify the incentive payouts were proper.

With these documentation issues, Visit Jacksonville says they’ve reworked employee folders and created new documents which should more clearly and accurately account for some of these shortfalls.

In another area covered by the audit, reimbursements sometimes didn’t have the right support or any support at all. Auditors found more than $25,600 in reimbursements that had no supporting documentation- like receipts- or had incomplete or insufficient documentation on file. In still other cases, the reimbursement requests weren’t signed by a supervisor.

“Visit Jacksonville agrees that supporting documentation is extremely important and will enforce procedures and policies to ensure that when original documentation is removed from filing locations, they are returned in a timely manner. These files were referenced multiple times in a short period of time and filing errors occurred,” says comments from Visit Jacksonville’s President and CEO Paul Astleford, included in the Auditor’s report.

There were three apparently duplicated reimbursements as well, totaling $2,080.77. Astleford’s comments say one of the employees involved is still active and has reimbursed the organization, although the other two don’t work with Visit Jacksonville any more. They’ve also added new filing and organizational measures to better keep track of reimbursements connected to various events.

The comments included from Astleford further say the group will enforce all signing policies with reimbursements in the future.

Authorization questions were another one of the threads through the audit. For the timekeeping system used by hourly employees, the Auditor’s Office found there was no requirement a supervisor approve time. Auditors found there was a policy, but it was not consistently documented, so they couldn’t ensure it was working properly. Visit Jacksonville has since started a two-step review and approval.

Another authorization question was in large part the result of a small staff- with Visit Jacksonville and the Auditor’s Office both noting they only had one professional accountant to handle several tasks that should ideally be segregated among different people, to reduce the risk of fraud. Visit Jacksonville has now added more segmentation and additional levels of authorization.

There are also checks that didn’t have the right authorizing signatures- four checks totaling $11,141.32 had no authorizing signatures but were cashed, and two checks totaling $47,756.20 were signed by someone who wasn’t authorized to under the current policies and procedures. Visit Jacksonville attributes the bulk of the first grouping to poor documentation of a transaction, although the transaction itself was approved, according to Astleford’s comments. He says the checks that were signed by someone who wasn’t authorized was actually a matter of their policy not being updated to reflect practice, wherein an Immediate Past Chair is allowed to sign if he or she is still sitting on the Board. That policy has been updated as well.

Some of the other fixes were simple- auditors found Visit Jacksonville kept their blank checks in an unlocked cabinet in an employee’s office, which was sometimes left open and unattended. The checks have since been moved to a secure location. There were also some areas of inconsistencies- like different policies with how checks are approved and how direct deposits are approved.

Visit Jacksonville is funded through a portion of the City’s bed tax revenue. That budget is $4,820,743 for FY 16-17. The scope of the audit was October 1, 2014 through September 30, 2016.