By Connor Currrier
During an Aug. 27 Moriarty City Council Special Meeting, Financial Analyst Emily Sanchez said the city’s financial record books have “un-posted transactions” dating all the way back to 2015 during a financial analyst update.
“There’s been un-posted transactions still sitting there from (July) of 2015 to (July) of 2021,” said Sanchez. “They’re sitting there not posted to the general legger.”
Moriarty’s governing body says the government accounting software system Cassell has had significant problems. Cassell is a software system for governments and public entities that is used to keep records of payroll, general ledgers, accounting and more.
According to the financial update, there were systematic problems going back even further due to an incorrect setup from the beginning. Sanchez noted the problems span roughly over a decade, with issues being traceable to 2015.
However, when Moriarty Mayor Brandon Webb asked, “Is Cassell the right system?”, she responded by saying, “We need to be working with it because it’s a government software and it has its double entries,” said Sanchez.
Councilor Kim Garcia says they shouldn’t blame the software system and said the fundamental issue isn’t Cassell but rather the quality of data that has been entered over time.
“With any software or database, you usually get out of it what you put into it,” said Garcia. “As long as there is bad information put into it, we’ll just continue to get that out of it.”
Webb said it’s been difficult for the city to make informed financial decisions without having accurate information.
“For the last year, it’s been hard for us to tell employees we can’t do this. We don’t know what the numbers are,” said Webb.
Recently, NM.news reported that the City of Moriarty had numerous years of failed audit reports and overspending its budget by millions of dollars.
Chris Varner, an audit partner for Moriarty, who was hired to help with the city’s audit and financial records, said the 2022 audit report was so bad that the previous audit partner could not judge the situation.
“FY 22, the city had a disclaimer of opinion, and what that means is your records, according to the auditor, were so bad that they couldn’t audit it, so they didn’t give any opinion on any of the numbers.”
