That we do within our division, communicating a little clearer with the apartments, and reporting deadlines on our shared calendar.

Again, we're just getting this going this year's year of fun with a lot of the changes and improvements this 2026.

So we want to start behaving like a 2026 on so we're not in the paper file world anymore.

So we gotta have to streamline what we're doing on and our shares of them.

We're gonna start holding the departments accountable with the policies and procedures and combined with what they have to do.

I send quarterly reminders out to the departments because there's a lot of turnovers there as well.

There's not a true training process going on yet.

That is something in the near future we hope to be able to do with Michelle Nelson.

Um she's our new grant um seeker director, I forget her right term, but she's gonna help us bring everybody together in the training sessions for just a little bit far far out with that, probably this summer is what I'm looking for to that.

Um we are from develop um cohesive policy manuals and desk procedures, not only for our division, but we will also do it uh community wide.

Um we have somebody helping us with that that we're borrowing ahead of that for HANA, right?

Um that city was lended to us, so he's helping us get some templates going.

So it's getting pretty exciting.

I just had my first uh meeting with my leadership team for this new quarter year.

Um I say new year because the last two months have been pretty crazy.

Uh, we're gonna start streamlining and documenting all of our processes, not only with grants, but um throughout the division, so that when somebody does this, or there is turnover, because there's going to be turnover or people retiring, that the knowledge is not lost with that.

Because that's a lot about the last 18 months that I encountered.

It's a lot of cleanup and catching things up.

Um, and then um let's see, I had a few of these.

If there's any specific questions about any clear um finding or concerns over everything, I'm happy to expand upon them.

Um I think I touched and kind of highlighted all the major things that's really about documentation and file management, sticking with uh compliance within the grants, and then as well as um deadlines.

Um, and then I saw one more that I overlooked that segregation of duties and oversight, we're making sure that not any one person is doing all the work and that our grant team um staff accountants understand what their role is, um, and then if they need help, they tag the supervisor or myself if we need to step in and help with things within the departments and and um and then just go in for the department to their turnover and just have that open communication open um throughout the municipality because it spreads pretty far neat, but um I'm happy to address any certain things and if the internal audit teams in our comments speak, we can go through you know the the whole finding is a fairly large list, so I didn't want to start reading rebatems on anything, but if anything stands out to any of the members um or internal audit or anybody in the audience, I'm happy to um address any of those specifically.

Thank you for that.

Um Buddh team want to come and give some context or background.

I see that.

Mr.

Burr.

Um one comment I'd like to make.

I am so happy to see so many assembly people uh not even on the committee joining today, so that's just brilliant.

So I really appreciate uh everyone on the phone and so forth.

Um this as a little bit of history here just for some of the new members.

Uh you know, the the entire grants team basically left a few years ago.

Um and that took a lot of knowledge and a lot of uh history that they have with them.

They're on where we had to rebuild up that that entire group, not just the accounting team or grants team, but the entire one.

And I think that's really what's led to a lot of these things.

I'm sure you're gonna hear later on today about the single audit, which is all grant-related as well.

And you know, we're two years now, and we have passed due on that particular one.

It's really the root of what we're talking about, what this audit is and what the ramifications of that is what you're seeing and what the city is dealing with at this particular point.

And I'm just going to kind of go into three segments just to kind of summarize here.

One is having accurate numbers, having accurate expenditures, having accurate recap numbers.

When you look at the audit and you go to a grant, and that we have three different points of contact, and they all have a different amount, and they all think that that number's correct.

How are we ever going to reconcile with that's an what's accurate when ultimately we have to put it into our single audit maybe a year or two down the road?

So having everybody agree with the numbers and the amounts and doing it on a timely basis is really a core thing.

So whatever the controller's department can do to get that under control going forward, I think is a huge, huge benefit.

We do have a grants module in SAP.

It was designed when we went live in 2017.

But all the people with experience, knowledge are all gone on that particular creation.

So we the other one of the other things that Stephanie talked about was training.

That was something we really saw across the board.

You have to understand we have grants being run by every single department, and the controller's department is just the central repository of reporting all of that and gathering it all.

How do we ensure as a city that the contract administrators or the grant administrators are actually doing their jobs and know what they're supposed to be doing?

When we looked at this, there's a whole bunch of training opportunities that are available that no one knew they were available, no one's taking those classes, no one's checking and mandating making sure that they're mandatory and completing.

And as she mentioned, there's a tremendous amount of turnover.

How are we watching and monitoring that on an ongoing basis?

So, you know, there's so much work to do on grants, and the accuracy is so important.

It really is a huge undertaking, which is why I wanted this to be one of the early audits that we really grabbed because I saw this as something that could really benefit the controller department.

We we have a long ways to go to get to a situation where we're really managing grants.

Now compounding all that is I think we've probably gone through the largest grant time periods in the history of the city with the ARPA and COVID and all of these grant things, and as we move out of that and have less grant monies, I'm hoping that that will be better for the city.

Not that we're not getting the money, but the administration of that going forward will be simpler because we're going to have less grants to do.

But there were a lot of lessons learned, and we have really suffered on the grant side for probably five years now.