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Contact:
Allie Dumski
Press Secretary
(614) 644-1111

Columbus – A 2019-2020 audit of the Allen-Clay Joint Fire District (Ottawa County) released today by Auditor of State Keith Faber’s office included a finding for recovery for $4,017 worth of undocumented credit card purchases.

“Credit cards can be extremely beneficial for efficiency’s sake, but they can easily cause transparency issues,” said Auditor Faber. “Last year we issued more than $10 million in findings for recovery and a lot of those dollars were the result of not following credit card policies - it is an easy fix.”

The District’s policy has a receipts section stating that, “Original, itemized receipts must be submitted to the Fiscal Officer or the Fiscal Officer’s designee as soon as reasonably possible. The receipt should include the customer copy of the receipt, any invoice from the vendor, the cost of the goods or services purchased, and the date of the purchase. The Authorized User should also submit documentation verifying the purchase was made on behalf of the District, if necessary to describe the purchase.”

The District did not provide supporting documentation for $4,017 in credit card expenditures made.  Without supporting documentation, auditors were unable to determine whether the unsupported expenditures were for a proper public purpose as well as which credit card user incurred the expense(s).

Prior District Fiscal Officer Donald Murray received or collected the public money used to make the improper payments and is liable (jointly and severally with his bonding company) for the $4,017 finding for recovery in favor of the Allen-Clay Joint Fire District General and EMS Funds.

The full report is available on the AOS website using Audit Search.

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The Auditor of State’s office, one of five independently elected statewide offices in Ohio is responsible for auditing more than 6,000 state and local government agencies. Under the direction of Auditor Keith Faber, the office also provides financial services to local governments, investigates and prevents fraud in public agencies, and promotes transparency in government.