Officials draft city policy for managing cash
New handling requirements cover basics
A few months after a scathing internal audit found insufficient cash-handling guidelines at city facilities contributed to an environment ripe for fraud and abuse, a new citywide policy for managing cash payments has been drafted, something the city of Santa Fe’s treasury officer said is a first step toward better and more consistent management of legal tender by city employees.
Across various city departments and at different sites where cash is collected, rather than a single set of “overarching” rules, there are “old, legacy practices,” and staff adhere to various non-uniform procedures, treasury officer Christina Keyes said.
“For whatever reason,” she said, “there wasn’t one unifying policy.”
The guidelines and requirements outlined in Keyes’ eightpage draft, to be reviewed by the Finance Committee, seem intended to lay out the basics, no surprise given the patchwork of unofficial procedures Keyes said they would replace.
The new cash-handling requirements, according to the draft, stipulate that a cash balance should be confirmed by both cashier and supervisor before a cashier begins to process transactions.
And cash collections must be counted at the end of each day’s transactions by an individual who did not perform cashier functions, according to the draft, and then reconciled with daily receipts by a third individual.
This separation of duties aligns with a recommendation made in the internal audit conducted earlier this year that found cash-management problems at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center, the popular south-side recreation complex.
More broadly, the absence of a single cash-handling policy for city employees “creates an environment that is conducive to fraudulent activity,” according to that audit.
Although the audit centered on problematic oversight at the Chavez Center, the lack of clearly defined policies and procedures on cash management, among other subjects, “is a widespread problem with the city,” the audit stated.
In her report, Internal Auditor Liza Kerr recommended development of a detailed policy for cash-handling. Clear department policies are a “first line of defense,” Kerr
wrote, against the sort of mismanagement of city assets that her audit said occurred at the Chavez Center.
The audit was prompted by a tip to the city’s fraud, waste and abuse hotline that cash at the recreation center was being skimmed and revenues were being fraudulently reported. The center’s longtime manager submitted her resignation around the time the audit was first obtained by The New Mexican. Another manager earlier in the year had resigned after being accused of selling cityowned scrap metal and pocketing the money.
A citywide cash-handling policy, Kerr added, “would provide consistency and ensure compliance with a basic internal control structure,” adding that various divisions could use the city policy as a “baseline.”
Keyes on Monday said she had already begun drafting the new internal policy months before the audit was released and that her draft simply dovetailed with the auditor’s finding that citywide rules were needed.
Other areas of cash management addressed in the draft concern how registers are operated, how receipts are documented, how receipts must be stored and kept secure and how daily deposits are made to the city cashier office.
The new cash policy requires the approval of both city Finance Director Adam Johnson and City Manager Brian Snyder, and, according to the draft, would go into effect Jan. 1.