State Comptroller Audits Village, Recommends Changes

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s issued a series of recommendations to Rockville Centre Mayor Fran Murray and the village board after recent audit of the village.

The audit looked at the internal controls over cash receipts from recreational activities and information technology from June 1, 2011, to May 31, 2012.

In his report, DiNapoli said his office found various discrepancies within cash receipts in the RVC Parks and Recreation Department.

The report states:

      The Board has not adopted written policies for cash receipts, segregated critical duties so that one individual does not control all phases of a transaction, or designed procedures so that someone is reconciling and reviewing the daily cash list to properly safeguard Village assets. Because of these weaknesses, there is an increased risk that errors or irregularities could occur and remain undetected and uncorrected.

The comptroller also said that the recreation center only has one cash register with a total of eight employees using it and no identification code for each employee, which “makes it impossible to track discrepancies by employee.”

DiNapoli said his office reviewed receipts collected for 25 days and found that seven register receipts totaled $1,231 more than the corresponding deposit slips. There  were also 18 daily cash sheets that were $3,119 less than what was in the register.

“After we brought these variances to the attention of village officials, they provided explanations for some of the discrepancies,” the comptroller said in his report.

"The bottom line is all monies have, and continue to be, properly accounted for," Village Comptroller Michael Schussheim told Newsday [paid link].

The second part of the comptroller’s report focused on the internal controls over IT that need to be made within the village.

      We found that copies of back-up data are not stored in a secure off-site location, and the Board has not developed a disaster recovery plan. As a result, there is an increased risk of the loss of critical data, and/or interruptions to the Village’s computerized operations.

According to Murray, the village will implement "most of the recommendations" from the comptroller's office in regard to the improvement of internal controls over cash receipts from recreational activities.

The mayor continued by saying that all of the recommendations for the IT department will be put into place.

"A disaster recovery plan will be developed by my staff and submitted for approval to the board of trustees," Murray said. "Beyond the adoption of this plan, the village intends to enhance its information technology back-up capabilities."

Murray said the village servers will also be updated to prevent any potential problems in the future.