Bethany Beach Audit Committee members met on Wednesday, Nov. 14, to further clarify a number of new policies related to the town’s new internal auditor position.
Longtime resident, retired certified public accountant and head organizer of the annual Fourth of July parade Phil Rossi has been tapped for those part-time paid duties, and he presented a formal job description for the role on Nov. 14.
The primary feature of the job is to follow a checklist of audit elements throughout the year, along with any other duties assigned to him by the audit committee, which oversees his work.
Rossi also told committee members last Wednesday that he had already begun to review the new internal audit checklist through periodic examinations of various steps, to see how well the collective list will work. Already, he said, some changes had been made to fine-tune the list.
Most of the items, however, were already being used by Rossi in the early days of his service as internal auditor. Rossi said he had received excellent cooperation from town staff as he pursued those duties.
Former councilman and Audit Committee member Lew Killmer praised the effectiveness of the internal audit function, noting that such work was key in preventing fraud along the lines of that discovered in Harrington earlier this year.
“We’ve never had a problem here,” Finance Director Janet Connery emphasized on Nov. 14. “This is all protection for the future.”
Committee members are firmly in agreement that they’d rather be safe than sorry, despite the town’s stellar finance record.
“If we had a problem in Bethany Beach,” said committee chairman Don Doyle, “it would be disastrous.”
The attention to detail from the committee has been notable from the start, despite the town’s comparatively small government and finance department. Council Member Joseph T. Healy recommended a number of minor changes on Nov. 14, aimed at making such operations entirely beyond reproach, including asking Connery to hold off on opening bank statements until Rossi can oversee their contents.
“A vast majority of frauds in small companies wouldn’t exist if they did that,” Healy said.
Doyle further recommended that the town adopt a policy requiring employees to take all two weeks of their allotted vacation at one time, to allow others to step into their duties and thus ensure that no one is committing any violations of ethical procedures.
Connery argued that requiring all two weeks to be taken at once would likely prove unworkable for the small town government and most employees. Doyle said he thought at least one week should be taken at a time for reasons of internal oversight, and Connery said she would discuss the recommendation with Town Manager Cliff Graviet before the committee’s next meeting.
Committee members agreed on Nov. 14 to put in place Rossi’s recommended internal audit checklist and to ask him for further recommendations on it after a year. They also gave the thumbs-up to a new whistleblower policy that informs employees what and to whom they should report when potential unethical behavior by town employees is spotted.
The committee also recommended the town reconsider a draft code of ethics developed several years ago but never directly implemented. Instead, elements of the policy were incorporated into the town employee handbook. But committee members said they felt a standalone policy would prove more useful as a separate document.