By Jesse White for Mesabi Tribune
HIBBING — The City of Hibbing has received a clean bill of health from its auditors.
During a short presentation at last week’s regular city council meeting, Bonnie Schwieger, from the city’s accounting firm ABDO, told city officials that overall, it was a “very clean audit year.”
Schwieger ran through a slide presentation and told the council that there were no concerns and no issues with internal controls, state statutes and federal statutes, and that the general fund balance remains healthy.
“The general fund has historically had a very health fund balance and this year it did increase slightly from where it was last year,” she said. “We like to look at the fund balance compared to the funds you need for next year’s budget. So, you can see we are at about 131% of next year’s budget.”
Revenues were significantly over budget, Schweiger said, as there was a lot of earnings from interest.
“The city budgets very conservatively when it comes to interest earnings and they exceeded their market expectations,” she said.
According to information provided by ABDO, actual revenues for the year were $24,789,442 versus a final budgeted amount of $21,978,359. The actual expenditures amount was $22,173,055, versus the budgeted amount of $21,569,800. The excess of revenues over expenditures was $2,616,387 with a variance with the final budget of $2,207,836.
Schweiger went on to point out that the city used some of their reserves this year to transfer out about $4 million to fund capital projects and some other development items.
“But you can see even with that transfer out your fund balances are still over the city policy and you’re still in a very healthy place,” she said.
Later in the meeting the council voted to approve the 3-year proposal from Abdo for auditing services for the years ending December 31, 2025, 2026 and 2027 in an amount not to exceed $162,525.
Full article: https://www.mesabitribune.com/news/city-of-hibbing-has-very-clean-audit-year/article_d42c0496-715f-4b03-80c7-3c35d2df324f.html