Auditors and fraud

In the Austin American Statesman an article titled, “Austin’s delayed audit comes back clean. This article was about Austin being audit for financial flaws. It had been a seven month delay on Austin’s audit given by an outside auditor, but on Tuesday the report was out. KPMG LLP reported that Austin was good, but they didn’t let Austin get completely off. The auditors found many flaws with Austin’s Convention Center dealing with the money department. In this former department Director Korbert Hodge was allowed to make purchases and do other things without oversight. I feel that this is wrong. By giving anyone this much power it makes it much easier to have fraud and no one would no about it until it was too late. Then the tax payers would be the ones to suffer. Hodge was fired and is now under investigation for his miss use of money as a Department Director, which proves my point of too much power to one person is never good. Now an internal auditor position has sense been added to watch contract compliance, purchasing ext. I think that this position was a much needed and a very good idea and should have been in place to prevent a problem in the first place. The Auditor also found that in 2006 a purchase was made that went against the city charter, because it was made without the city counsels approval; and went over the amount that city manager Toby Futrell could sign off on without the city counsel. I feel that this is really bad, because how does Austin expect the citizens to follow the rules and laws if the leaders don’t. I definitely feel that something needs to be done about this fraud to make sure this never happens again.