By CAT MURPHY
Amid growing concerns about the City of Hyattsville’s perpetually late audits, the city filed an audit it owed the state two years ago and laid out a tentative plan for completing its two remaining backlogged audits.
The city completed its fiscal year 2022 financial audit on Oct. 7, nearly two years after Maryland’s Oct. 31, 2022, filing deadline. Hyattsville’s FY 2023 audit, which was due last October, is still outstanding, and the city will miss the FY 2024 filing deadline later this month.
The city’s auditor, Robert Diss of Lindsey + Associates LLC, is expected to present the findings of Hyattsville’s FY 2022 audit at the city council’s Oct. 21 meeting.
But many residents are focused less on the audit’s contents, and more on the fact that it’s two years out of date.
“It’s very concerning that we’re not up to date,” resident Daniel Broder told the Hyattsville Life & Times.
Resident Michael Gorman expressed similar frustrations during the Sept. 16 city council meeting, asking councilmembers to “please attend to this problem before it blows up in our faces.”
“The city’s audits have been overdue repeatedly, again and again, off and on, for years — not just once, not just for a month, but over and over for a long time,” Gorman said. “It’s clear that there’s some deeper problem, and that problem is a problem that city council needs to solve.”
Historically, Hyattsville officials have attributed the delays to the pandemic and the loss of its previous auditor, CohnReznick.
“When COVID hit, that just put us a little further behind,” City Treasurer Ron Brooks said at the Sept. 16 city council meeting. “That’s just the reality of it. And so, we’re catching up. It’s not an excuse … it’s just what it is.”
But Hyattsville’s audit issues predate the pandemic by more than a decade. The audit reports posted to the city’s website show that the city has not completed an audit on time since at least 2006.
City officials have countered that the city was on track to clear its audit backlog before the pandemic hit in March 2020.
“Had we not gone into COVID and lost the 2 1/2 years in addition to an auditing firm, I firmly believe we would have been caught up,” City Administrator Tracey Douglas said at the Sept. 16 city council meeting.
Yet this assertion is at odds with the fact that the city has completed each of its last 14 audits at least 18 months past the filing deadline.
And these delays showed no meaningful improvement in the three years prior to the pandemic. Hyattsville’s audits from FY 2017, FY 2018 and FY 2019 are each dated between 608 and 617 days — more than 20 months — past the filing deadline.
The delays associated with the city’s audit backlog did get longer during the pandemic, however.
For example, Hyattsville’s FY 2020 audit was over 950 days late when it was completed in June 2023. And when the city filed its FY 2021 audit earlier this year, it was roughly 900 days overdue.
By comparison, the FY 2022 audit filed this week was 707 days late — still slightly more delayed than the city’s pre-pandemic audits, but about 6 1/2 months earlier than its two pandemic-era audits.
“We’re getting there,” Brooks said in September. “I think this will be the first time ever that we would have pulled off back-to-back audits in the same calendar year.”
Under state law, municipalities that fail to meet Maryland’s audit filing requirements risk losing state funding, though this penalty is rarely enforced. Hyattsville’s overdue audits have, however, resulted in the city losing its credit rating.
Audit delays are not unique to Hyattsville, however.
When the Maryland Office of Legislative Affairs published its most recent review of local government audits in August, 40 local governments had not filed the required audit reports or had filed after the required filing date. The City of Hyattsville was one of seven municipalities with at least two outstanding audits.
Brooks, who has served as city treasurer for more than a decade, has outlined a plan to complete Hyattsville’s FY 2023 and FY 2024 audits in the next six months.
The city is on track to complete the older of the two outstanding audits by the end of this year, he said.
“My hope is to get most of the … financial analytical field work done in the month of October, and hopefully my goal is to get the [FY 2023] across the finish line the last week of December,” Brooks said at Monday’s City Council meeting.
He has previously said that he expects to file the city’s FY 2024 audit in the early months of 2025.
“We’ll probably start it sometime at the beginning of December, with anticipation of completion sometime within the first quarter of 2025,” Brooks said in September. “By the end of March, I’m hoping to have [FY 2024] done, which will … more than catch us up, and we’ll be in pretty good shape.”
