Committee meeting to order for December the second.

We'll start this meeting with invocation, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

If everybody please rise.

You would bow your heads.

Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us all here together safely.

Please guide us in this committee to make the best decisions for Ward County.

And please look after all county employees as they go about their jobs today.

And thank you for protecting them.

Let us all reflect on the true meaning of Christmas and what this time has to offer.

In your name, we pray.

I'm in.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God indivisible with Liberty and Justice Forming on to the review and approval of agenda contents.

Motion to approve.

Absolutely.

All in favor, aye.

The ayes have it.

Moving on to the approval of the minutes from the October 28th, 2025 meeting.

Motion to approve.

All in favor, aye.

Aye.

Ayes have it.

Moving down to new business.

Independent auditor required communications.

Mr.

Grant Davis.

Welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for being here.

Always happy to, even on a wet, cold day.

So I've got a presentation here, obviously, just to go through these required communications at the conclusion of our audit, but just to give you a kind of a brief timeline of the matters pertaining to the audit.

We I was here to discuss the the audit itself back in, I think June, just to keep you all informed of where we are, which was basically nowhere at that point.

We had really not started.

We'd done some preliminary work, which is customary, but throughout the ensuing months, after obviously after June 30th, the year in, uh, we conducted our audit procedures and have issued our opinion, and it was dated in November right before Thanksgiving.

And I see in front of you got this big beautiful document that's nearly 400 pages.

I was sick of looking at that thing by the time Thanksgiving rolls around.

It's uh quite an undertaking, as I'm sure you can imagine, all the information that goes into that.

But again, I'm happy to be here to communicate the results of our audit and to talk about the things that we're required to talk about.

Uh a little bit unique in this year, and I'll I'll touch on this as a in a minute is the and you'll see even here this third bullet, the status of the federal single audit.

That's a little unique, and I'll leave that as a cliffhanger for the moment.

But again, just some uh sort of the baseline of what I'm gonna speak about here for the next few moments.

We'll read this to you.

This is just information about who we are as a firm.

Uh just needless to say, it's a significant portion of what we do as a firm, and it's really all I do.

So you can uh can kind of congratulate me or pity me, however, you may feel about that.

But working with governments is all I do year-round.

Um so here we get to the results of the audit.

And if you if if you happen to be flipping around in the book uh itself, you'll notice right at the beginning of the document that we've issued our our we've included our independent auditors report.

Uh it goes on for three pages, I think.

But in any event, first page, second paragraph is our opinion on the financial statements, and it's an unmodified opinion or a clean opinion.

I think I've said this before, but unmodified is really not glamorous language, but it's really the only acceptable result in a financial statement audit.

So again, a clean opinion on the financial statements, and you can read throughout our acronyms as to the auditing standards that we are required to follow and that we did follow relative to the performance of our audit.

The last sort of bullet section on this slide refers to this report is what we call our yellow boot report.

So this is a report on internal controls and compliance over laws, regulations, grant agreements, things of that nature.

And this is going to feed into this federal single audit that I was going to speak to in a moment.

But historically, there's been a section within the within the Act for itself called the compliance section.

And within that section, we would have this yellow book report that's referred to here, and then a report on compliance that's specific to federal awards.

This year was a little was a unique year in that the federal government publishes annually a document that they call the compliance supplement, and it is the audit guide for how they want auditors to perform federal single audits, which again are just compliance audits.

And just so you're all aware, if you're not, any time or any fiscal year in which you expend over $750,000 in federal money triggers the compliance audit.

The federal government comes out with this compliance supplement each year in typically May or June.