The City of Hanceville got as clean an audit as a municipality can receive for FY 2016, the most recent fiscal year for which the city’s financial practices can be scrutinized.

Local accountant Scotty R. Segroves, whom the city has retained as an independent auditor for the past several years, gave the city a clean bill of health financially and — significantly — offered no recommendations for ways the city could improve its spending and bookkeeping.

That’s a first, said a pleased Kenneth Nail, the city’s mayor.

“In the nine years that I’ve been mayor, we’ve never had anything major, and this is the cleanest audit we’ve had during that whole time. Absolutely no suggestions or procedural changes to what we’re doing — and this is probably the first time that’s ever happened,” he said.

“Over the years, Mr. Segroves has made — and we’ve implemented — recommendations about ways we can tighten up various things; how we send out and track our purchase orders, and things like that. But this is the first year that he didn’t have any recommendations for anything we could do differently.

“A big part of that is because we’ve been following the recommendations he’s made in prior years. And I think we’ve finally gotten to a point where we’ve kind of incorporated all the things our auditor suggests, and it’s paying off for the City of Hanceville. We got a completely clean scorecard.”

The audit covers the city’s fiscal year spanning Oct. 1, 2015 through Sept. 30, 2016. Past audits have yielded minor vulnerabilities in the way the city keeps records of its spending, but no instances of theft or malfeasance under Nail’s nearly decade-long tenure as the city’s mayor.

“The biggest thing to me, and the first question always I ask when an audit comes back: ‘Is anybody stealing anything?’” said Nail.

“Because of some of the things that had happened in the more distant past, before the current mayor and council, that’s something I’m pretty sensitive about, and a lot of folks in Hanceville are sensitive about it too. It’s kind of the main question to ask, and I’m pleased that the answer is ‘No, absolutely not.’”

 

Benjamin Bullard can be reached by phone at 256-734-2131 ext. 145.