Get Town Hall in order before moving sewer collections:

from the fiscal year 2018 Town audit management letter.

3. Closing Checklists
Closing checklists are employed by accounting departments to better ensure that all routine and non-routine accounting transactions and reconciliations are performed and the final outputs (i.e., the Town’s balance sheet and Schedule A) are reviewed for accuracy and completeness. The use of closing checklists is commonplace in private industry but is seldom used in the public sector. The Town had great difficulty getting its free cash approved; in the end it was approved at the expected amount, but the Department of Revenue process was not used properly. We recommend that the Town Accountant, Treasurer/Collector develop a closing checklist to monitor and track the annual accounting close in order for the process to be more efficient in the future.

6. Indirect Costs (repeated from prior year) Water, sewer, and light indirect costs are approved at Town Meeting, and transfers are made annually into the General Fund. However, they are not reflected as transfers on the tax recap, but instead as miscellaneous revenues and expenses. Furthermore, the transfers are not made if sufficient resources do not exist in the enterprise funds, and there is no formal process to the calculation of indirect costs from year to year. A more comprehensive calculation of indirect costs should be undertaken, documented, and signed off by the Town and enterprise funds with updates performed every few years.

9. Treasurer/Collector Office (repeated from prior year)
In our letter to management dated March 23, 2017 we identified 17 critical areas in the Treasurer/Collectors Office that needed to be addressed. Many of those have been addressed through fiscal year 2018, however some remain and should be addressed in the current fiscal year. Those are highlighted as follows:
• While efforts are made to collect cash from department heads weekly, there is no formal policy regarding cash held by departments outside the Treasurer’s Office. The Treasurer was unaware that all Town cash is under the Treasurer’s control, and the Treasurer has the duty to force effective internal control policies on all departments who handle cash. 
• Presently, the Collector does not use a lock box to collect taxes. A lock box is essentially a third-party collector of taxes. Taxpayers mail their payments to a Post Office box, and the third-party collector deposits the funds for the Town and posts activity for all those who have paid. Daily, an electronic file is then sent to the Town where payments are uploaded automatically to the Town’s system.
• Cash forecasts are currently not prepared as part of a monthly routine. This is a critical process for Towns that are cash stressed; we suggest such a process is implemented immediately.