Thank you very much.

I always like to have the audience introduce themselves because they're the ones that get the real work done.

So thank you for all your efforts.

That as you are speaking, please do turn on your mics so that the uh recording can pick up your voice.

This meeting is recorded and then is available for public viewing.

First order of business after introductions, then is the review of the minute meetings from our last meeting, October 31st, 2025.

Any comments or corrections to the minutes.

Mr.

Chairman, I move that we adopt the minutes from the last meeting.

Okay.

I'm gonna I should have spoke first.

Um if if I can, Counselor.

Um I had a discussion with um Director Jones on this when I reviewed the minutes.

Um I noticed at the end there was just kind of there was a list of questions, but no answers.

And so I've asked um Director Jones to go back and add the answers to those questions for the minutes so that we have those.

And so if it's okay with you, counselor, um I would like to hold that motion and then review it, and then next committee member we'll take or the next committee meeting we'd take action on the minutes if that's exactly.

Sure.

I am in my motion accordingly.

Thank you very much.

So um with no other corrections, if you just go back and add in the question or the answers to the questions, then we can take them minutes next next meeting.

Sure, we'll do that and and recirculate them to the committee and then you know, approve in July.

Very good, thank you.

Um as a reminder to committee members, uh remaining meetings for 2026 is uh Friday, July 31st, 2006, uh 9 a.m.

in room 221.

And then our final meeting um for 2026 will be October 30th, 2026, 9 a.m.

in room 221.

As a further reminder the to the committee members uh at your annual economic statements of interest um are due and and to be returned to the Office of Corporation Council between April 1st and May 1st of 2026.

I assume those will be emailed out to the committee members.

Yes, they will be.

Okay.

And then it has to be turned in between April 1st and May 1st, right?

Indeed, yeah, the deadline is May 1st.

So a full month.

Okay.

We'll remind you in case you forget.

Very good, thank you.

Uh any other administrative updates from committee members prior to getting into the presentation by Director Jones.

Very good.

All right.

The floor is yours, sir.

Thank you.

Um so we have a relatively light agenda today uh in terms of number of uh uh discussion items, but we have a number of updates to kind of provide you that have taken place over the past six months, I guess, since we last met.

So we will hop into our presentation and I will uh kick it over to Deputy Director Vivian Agnew to kind of uh get us started.

Good morning, folks.

Uh so today as a brief overview, we're gonna speak through um just an administrative update.

We'll talk about the work we've done uh since January um to today.

Um I'll give you a brief kind of update on the 2025 annual report, specifically focusing on audit committee activities for that year.

Um and then Wes will go into our 2026 risk assessment and annual plan.

Um so to get us started on that administrative update.

Uh we are very happy to have uh Malik Awadoyan joining our staff.

He was um he joined very recently as of March 2nd.

He's in our senior auditor role, and we're super happy to have him and very excited to get him ready and acclimated to the city county environment.

In terms of staff development and utilization, we have a couple opportunities coming up in the next month or so.

We have our 2026 International Society for Performance Improvement Annual Conference.

This is not something our staff has engaged in before, but it's a we had a virtual option, and we really want to get an opportunity for our performance staff in particular to have some of those continuing professional education pieces.

So we're very excited to have folks participate in that this year.

We're also going to make a visit over to the State House for Data Day 2026.

If you guys haven't been, it's a really cool opportunity to see what the state and other agencies and other municipalities are doing around data.

And it's just a great time to network and get to know folks who are doing very similar work to us.

So if you haven't been able to participate in that before, I think it's at least checking, it's at least worth checking out the website.

I think they always have Chick-fil-A for lunch as well, which is a big plus for me.

So 1010 would recommend.

And finally, this one we go to often.

We have our 2026 conference with the association of local government auditors.

Last year I remember that conference being super valuable.

We got a lot of good information about out of it and some ideas that we were able to use to streamline kind of our workflow and efforts.

So we're very excited for our audit staff to be able to see what we can glean from that again this year.

Another reminder about your economic statements of interest.

Please turn those in.

Again, we'll send you reminders.

I think specifically just for your guys' awareness, that email will come from like the ethics at indie.gov email address.

It will not come from us.

So it is not a phishing alert or anything like that.

It is gonna come from a separate email address.

We'll send you another separate reminder, but the first time you hear about it, it will come from the ethics at indie.gov email address.

Before you move on, um, Vivian, on your staffing, does that bring your agency up to full staffing?

Yes, it does for a little while.

We have um a person who is um currently on maternity leave, so she is so we're like not quite fully staffed because she's away, which is an excellent thing.

We're very happy for her.

And then we do have somebody leaving our agency a little in about a month, I think, um, the first week of April or so.

Um but it's a great move.

We're super happy for him.

He'll actually be joining the controller's office.

And while we're sad to see him go, he will be an excellent addition to your team, Abby.

Um so we're happy to keep good people in the city, and we'll get started on that next performance consultant role as soon as um we're able to do so.

So from a staffing perspective, as we go into the audit, you're you feel you're fully staffed.

Yes, on the audit side, we will be fully staffed.

Okay, thank you.

Um let's jump over to 2026 year to date.

Um, so the audit engagements we're currently working on are that Marion County Auditor's Office audit with the benefit leave.

Um, we're still continuing to work on that.

There's a couple of other testing pieces we want to finish wrapping up, um, but we should be able to get that done ideally before uh we see you next in July.

And then we've also been working with the Office of Public Health and Safety.

Um, I'm happy to report that we've had our exit conference recently.

There are a few um kinds of updates we'd like to make to the report as a result of that conference, but we should be able to have that out publicly um quite soon.

So happy to share that with you guys and talk through it as needed.

Um, in terms of enterprise collaboration, um, I know that Wes has continued working on the enterprise culture working groups.

Um that process is kind of wrapping up and they're getting ready to kind of distribute a plan for how we're gonna move forward in terms of that uh working culture, and we're very excited to see what happens there.

Um on our performance side, we um last year uh released our indie lean continuous improvement training.

So that's fully available to all staff and employees of the City County Enterprise, and it's always on demand, so people can take it as needed.

Um in December of last year, we were able to add a new module across audit and across performance.

We heard from a lot of folks that they wanted more help with uh developing standard operating procedures for their office.

So our audit team and our performance staff worked really collaboratively to build out a module specifically related to standard operating procedures, which fits in nicely with the lean continuous improvement training already, and so that's been something we were able to unveil and are excited to kind of advertise a little more a little later in this year, and we're hopeful that that's something that's very beneficial just across departments and agencies.

Um it's always great to have good standard operating procedures.

So in terms of our kind of flagship program, indie performs on the performance side.

Um we had our symposium event, which was hosted on January 29th.

Um that event was excellent.

Uh we had folks from previous sessions kind of show folks um what they had done in terms of the graphs and uh dashboards they'd built out in Power BI.

This event was a little less well attended than it was last year, but I'm gonna blame that on the big snowstorm we had.

That was the day that we all like took Monday off because there was snow was so bad and we couldn't come in.

So that event was hosted Thursday, and I think people were still kind of figuring out whether or not they wanted to make the track.

But otherwise, I think even with the snow, it was very well attended.

We had lots of participation from the folks who did come.

Um and it was very exciting to just see what people had been able to accomplish with the help of the Office of Audit and Performance.

So excellent event, and we're excited to host it again next year.

Um we do have a current session of the Indie Performance Program that's ongoing through April 2nd.

We have 24 participants enrolled currently, and our official class periods start next week.

So very excited to engage in that as well and see what folks come up with.

Um next, we'll go to the 2025 annual report.

Um I'm gonna focus today on the activities that your um audit committee has completed.

Um, of course, we always like to pepper in some of the things that the Office of Audit and Performance has done as well in the annual performance in the annual report, but generally this is um a report that kind of goes over your guys' activities so we can inform folks of what we did last year.

Um on March 7th, we had Forvis Mazars present um an update on their external audit planning.

So they kind of went over the scope of work with you guys and talked about some of the risk areas they were focusing on.

Um, in terms of our administrative update, we covered the risk assessment results in the 2025 annual plan, which you'll hear about from Wes again shortly.

Um July 25th, we went over the external audit results, which was generally the bulk of that meeting.

We had clean reports for both the city and the county, so excellent work there, which I'll credit again to our uh staff just across the enterprise who are working hard towards making sure we have all of our I's dotted and T's crossed.

Um October 31st, we had um another kind of brief meeting that focused specifically on OAP's activities.

We gave um an enterprise and an enterprise risk and safety presentation that was shared on behalf of OFM's risk management folks.

Um, and then we also shared some updates around cybersecurity, which we presented on behalf of the Internal Services Agency.

So that's kind of what we got what you guys took care of last year.

It was a really productive year, and um, we should be able to have the contents of that report ready and shared with you shortly so that we can um approve it in the next meeting.

And I'll kick it over to Wes.

All right, thank you, Vivian.

Appreciate that.

Uh looking at our 2026 risk assessment, if you kind of recall, we have two portions of it.

So there's a quantitative portion and a qualitative portion.

This year, we every year honestly, we continue to kind of revise our approach to make it more accurate and more useful for us and our work uh throughout the year.

So this year we reinstated uh more of the qualitative portion of our risk assessment and uh took a lot of time to sit down with about 10 different city-county leaders and different uh agencies that have responsibility over financial controls, risk, uh, and the like.

So I kind of jumped ahead, but that uh was the most impactful part of our our risk assessment this year, and we got a lot of great information from those folks that are engaged in those activities.

On the quantitative side, we looked at nine measurable risk factors that include employee tenure, budgetary expenses uh from our audited financials as well as federal grant expenditures.

And uh this is a semi-complicated Excel model that uh we took we adjust again year in and year out to adjust for various risk factors, any new information we we learn, uh, budgets and other metrics change of course year over year, and so we kind of make adjustments for those.

But it all it just helps kind of uh give us a guideline to apply uh some of the other qualitative measures that we learn through our interviews.

Uh like I mentioned there's a weighted scale that considers both the regular relative magnitude and and like and potential impact for uh risk-related matters in those areas, um, and then it kind of essentially spits out a score per agency or department about what their rating is for that year, and then we compare that to a prior year and you know, tend to focus in on ones that have either significantly increased or significantly decreased to try to understand some of the primary drivers of those changes.

I mentioned the interviews that we had, those were great.

We'll probably look to expand those next year.

It's sometimes difficult through the end of the year, holidays, beginning of the year, to get these folks uh on these folks' calendar because they're quite busy, but uh they were all very helpful in speaking with us and very candid, and it was quite informative.

And so again, that kind of works as a guide and uh helps identify some risk areas, and if you'll recall, we've we've kind of revised our approach.

Um we're continuing to revise it, but we're actually kind of making some great strides on it now, in that we're gonna look more at specific risk areas and then select different agencies and departments that where those risks fall to have greater audit coverage.

You know, historically a few years back, we would pick an agency based on that risk assessment and kind of audit that agency A to Z, which has some benefits, but I felt like we weren't able to get enough depth into kind of a number of key areas, and so by focusing on the risk area itself, and then applying uh those procedures across different agencies and departments.

I think we have a better risk coverage just given our kind of relatively small audit staffing compared to the scale and size of the enterprise.

Uh just looking at a couple of insights from the risk assessment.

Um a lot of these, if you've been around, are not necessarily surprising, but you know, they we do have inconsistent levels of expertise related to data literacy, technical knowledge, grant compliance, enterprise processes and expectations.

Uh this is something that I feel most agencies and departments are trying to combat every day.

Um specifically, our performance and innovation team does a lot of work around the data uh literacy element with the Indy Performance program.

Um we've got some new staff in the grants office, and uh everyone, of course, faces staffing issues, be it lack of staffing or or other related matters.

So it's it's a constant challenge, I believe, for city and county agencies, but I believe we are making strides, at least in the last four years.

I've seen quite significant strides in improving that and leveling up kind of the competencies of our staff.

Some other issues, um, you know, disaster recovery preparedness, including email, system resilience, data protection, and addressing matters that might arise with a significant event that could happen.

Uh, those have been talked about a lot more recently in terms of business continuity.

I know the OFM risk group is really concerned about this.

ISA is concerned about it, we're concerned about it too.

Um, but again, there are more conversations going on, I feel like than there have been historically, to address some of these things.

And frankly, COVID, I think, accelerated some of those improvements so that we're in a better place to be more responsive should an adverse event take place.

Uh a few other items that popped out were you know, proper oversight and usage of P cards and those controls.

Uh mentioned kind of the employment and staffing issues that that kind of persist across the enterprise.

And then are you know the recent changes over at the State House uh that have impacted uh revenue?

I'm sure our controller is cringing uh hearing that, but she's done a masterful job of kind of helping everyone through uh the budget process and the changes that have impacted kind of our operations, and those are uh again can significant risks and and items that kind of came out of our our risk assessment.

Any questions specifically on those?

Yes, Council Boots.

Thank you, Director Jones.

Um can you just refresh our memory?

When you talk about proper oversight of P card usage, what are you really referring to there?

Yeah, so a lot of our procurement cards have restrictions, of course, with like a limit and the types of merchant codes in which they can be used.

Some agencies and departments, due to the nature of their work, need to have some of those restrictions removed, uh, which opens the door for purchases that aren't for a business purpose.

And so uh we haven't explicitly found that to be the case or that to be happening.

Um, but the entire PCARD process is voluminous.

Of course, when you add up multiple cards off multiple agencies and departments, um, it it just remains a significant area of risk, and uh you know, we're keeping an eye on the controls and approvals and processes in that area to make sure that everything remains compliant.

You know, these are essentially credit cards given to certain employees that are charged with buying supplies or services for their particular job function.

That's correct, yes.

Anything you wouldn't you know procure through a traditional procurement process and setting up a contract with the vendor.

Um, you know, it's everything from Amazon to uh microphones crew.

Yeah, uh-huh, things that are that are kind of just uh a little lower dollar value.

Thank you.

Yep.

Any other questions from anyone?

Yeah, Chair Reynolds.

You mentioned um at the beginning earlier in your presentation that there were nine risk factors.

You mentioned three of them.

Can you list the other six?

Sure.

Uh I'm gonna challenge my knowledge here.

So uh four of them are characters one through four.

So the spin with our budgetary spin.

So character one, for those that aren't aware, character one is personnel expenses, character two is materials and supplies.

Yes, thank you.

Uh character three uh is contractual services basically.

Uh and then character four is with would capital be the way to say that capital kind of expenses, so desks, chairs, uh capital assets that will be um used by agencies and department.

And so we excluded character five, which is chargebacks, because it's kind of more of a financial transaction.

So those are the first four.

Um we look at um employee tenure.

So uh that's two of the categories.

So number of employees less than, I'm sorry, percentage of employees per unit that are less than have less than two years of tenure, and then the number of employees percentage of employees that have over 10 years, I believe, of tenure, um, because there are significant, or I won't say significant, but specific risks for each of those groups.

Um how many I add, is that six?

Uh total federal grant expenditures is another.

Um again, that is audited pretty heavily in the external audit.

Um, but uh just with all the compliance regulations that are are put on grant funding, there is can be various risks associated with having more of that.

And Heather, you can you help me out here?

Uh in mismanagement tips, the uh review because we are the ones who are in charge of receiving those tips and processing those tips, so we include that information by department.

Um trying to think of what the other ones are.

Now I'm drawing the point too.

Uh legal settlements.

Yes, thank you.

Legal uh payouts per department.

And workers' compensation.

So that's workers' compensation.

I think that's it.

I think that covers it perfectly.

See, that's why they're so good.

Exactly.

That's why uh introduced themselves.

Exactly.

Yes, yeah.

No, we we appreciate them.

So that's there are obviously other things we could bake into that, and we look at other factors year in and year out, but those are the primary ones that we felt really drive significant financial risk, and so we use those to do our calculations.

So are you prepared or in a position to tell the committee kind of the results and and what your plan looks like going forward, or at least initially?

I mean, I'm not sure how you how you roll this out throughout the course of the year.

For sure, yes.

And and as I get into the plan, it'll speak to that a little bit.

Um, but uh in July, I'm happy to do a more detailed um breakdown for you of kind of how we got to the decisions we made for kind of the risk areas that we plan to address.

Um we let this just a little more high level, but you'll see some of the carry-throughs and themes in kind of the planning for 2026 here.

Okay, very good.

Other questions.

Great, thank you.

So as we look to the plan for the rest of the year, um, of course, we have our continuous kind of ongoing items.

Uh the most the nearest, I guess that's about to kind of kick off is our external audit support.

We uh each year we lend about 400 hours from the audit team to support of the external audit.

We have been in contact with Forest Mazars on that.

That is uh about to heat up very shortly.

Um so we look forward to doing that.

Of course, we continue our cash count activities where we make spontaneous visits to ages agencies and departments that handle cash and uh do a spontaneous review of their cash control handling and procedures.

Uh we'll continue to administer our whistleblower tip line, so to speak.

It's an online form where uh folks inside or outside the enterprise can make uh anonymous uh submissions based on uh things that they observe.

Internal controls, of course, remains a priority uh between us and and OFM and um another member of other agencies.

Uh you know, continuing to educate our folks.

Forbus Mazars has been really a great partner in that and you know, offering our um internal controls training.

Uh we've done one or two each year, and we're in discussions about how best to do that once the audit concludes for this year.

Um again, the you know, next fall we'll be back in our risk assessment and um our internal kind of policies and procedures.

Uh the internal institute of internal auditors uh has continuing updates on their standards, and so we review and make sure we're applying those as necessary to remain compliant with those those regulations.

In terms of planned projects, uh, this is kind of where the tie-in to the risk assessment comes in.

So, as I mentioned, we want to do kind of more targeted audits, which are risk-based reviews of processes across various agencies.

Uh my next slide will get into the details of where we're gonna focus for this year, but that's gonna take up a chunk of time.

We always leave a little bit of capacity for special projects and assessments.

I feel like if you look at our time spend over the last couple years, that portion of it has increased, uh, which I think is good on a number of levels.

I think it speaks to the confidence that our colleagues have in our our department and um also their awareness to areas that need further examination and overall that's that's just a good thing.

So we always leave time for that.

Uh the performance and innovation team, of course, is doing a great job with the indie performance program.

Um the current session is winding down, um, but we'll have a summer twenty s six session as well as one in the fall.

And they're also continuing to work on that change management training, which will be released in in quarter three.

Any more questions on the plan?

Sure.

Thank you, Director.

The the whistleblower administration.

Can you just give us a little highlight on that recent activity, if any, in the past year of what kind of whistleblower complaints you typically receive or their nature?

Sure.

So the it's been a long process to get to where we are with this online form.

We used to be recalled we used to have an actual hotline.

It was a voicemail box, you would call and and leave the leave the details.

That began to be abuse uh for a number of different reasons.

We had, you know, um people calling in about a number of things that aren't related to city county business, and you know, when people Google whistleblower or p complaint, there's a number of things coming up.

We come up, SBOA comes up, uh federal agencies come up, so sometimes they just kinda spray and pray, I think say they just send the same thing to different things.

So a lot of those things don't apply to us.

Um with kind of the abuse we had where we had uh someone um that was in a facility that was kind of calling incessantly with uh inappropriate messages basically.

We felt it was best to kind of transition to something and provide it per present a little more structure so that people understood the types of complaints that we actually can field.

So we worked with ISA to develop this online form, which still allows anonymous submissions, but has a lot of disclaimers about if this is not related to City of Indianapolis or Marion County, Indiana business, then here are some other areas in which you should direct your complaint.

Um while that's helped some, we still the overwhelming majority of the complaints we get or submissions we get are not related to um city-county business.

It's um the restaurant across the street, you know, plays music too loud or you know, items like that.

Um there have been a couple of submissions that have um had some investigation and had some merit to them um largely related to behavior of of employees of specific departments kind of out in the community in the in the field, and so our process for those is to refer them to the appropriate party in that agency or department and uh they handle the action from there and we kind of just make sure that it's resolved.

Um so outside of kind of just general uh employee misconduct, is there any other kind of bucket that would I'm not over selling this, but the percentage is extremely low of relevant complaints.

I would say we're under 10%.

Is that accurate?

Yeah, yeah.

And I do want to clarify too, when we were talking about for the risk assessment, the FLAN tips.

This is the same thing.

The whistleblower and the FAM tips are the same thing.

Um but yeah, probably less than 10% of the tips we receive are ones that relate to anything within the city county, and even a small chunk of those are even actionable.

Most of them are the details that are included, are not specific enough for anybody to even understand what complaint they're trying to make.

Um, and they don't of course they have the option to remain remain anonymous, so we don't have the ability to follow up with them to ask for more specific details.

Um so when that when those tips come, you know, we're kind of there's not really any action available to us at that point.

Um, but then if there is ever anything that we do feel at least merits some attention, we make sure to forward it to um whichever agency would be appropriate to follow up on that.

We have not received any tips that I can speak of anyways that would rise to a level that would require us as the OAP to investigate or perform any type of um audit uh around.

So we're more or less just kind of a conduit for passing any relevant information on to the appropriate agency.

If that helps, it does, thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

I would say more of a comment in regards to your special requests area.

Um just to plant the seed, um, because I I think you guys do really do a good job looking into this, and I always use IHA as an example.

You've always been uh very helpful in understanding you know what the story has looked like there.

Um just something else that's come up, you know, in my line of experiences on the council has been the topic around public health, and one of those conversations locally um at least to city county employees, which is you know highly impactful to your area, um, is our DPC model or direct primary care.

And it's under my understanding that I mean that the controller could probably confirm that you know we do have some upcoming contractual um opportunities on the selection of who that direct primary care provider is.

And when I've had some of the conversations with uh executive leadership within the city, some of the concerns that we have is that we are paying for um duplicative uh services, and so specifically around um the the primary care part of it being uh multiple places to go get a physical, whether it be from the DPC model or through an insurance model, or even in some departments, uh the option can come through uh, and this is more on the public safety side, but through grants, and there's so there's three ways paying for you know, um go get an annual physical.

Um we're paying for those up front.

So that's one one side of that, there's duplicative triplicate triplicative um spending there.

The second is that we're paying for it up front.

And so we've got, and this is probably part more negotiation than anything, but just to see uh you know, out of curiosity from an audit standpoint of what is our cost on that.

Um, if we are paying for folks to go get physicals and they're not getting them, how much are we doing?

Exactly.

Utilization, so you know, as you know, uh just going through that topic of um special requests, knowing that there's a potential this year and next year, um, and opportunities to refine that, just ensuring that what we're paying for and what we're getting are you know, is they're not ever gonna be perfect, but is as close as possible, and at least having some insight before they jump into those conversations, I think would be really helpful for them, but also helpful for for us on the council to make sure that the employees and the families of those employees who work for or are part of the city council, uh city county, uh, have the most um you know bang for the buck as it comes to their health, and that we are considering their health as much as possible.

Sounds good.

Yeah, I appreciate that that comment.

We candidly have not kind of gotten into that area yet, so that's I have heard some of the conversations are going on, and there's some contractual renewals and things like that, but that's something we can have some discussions with our colleagues with and see if there's anywhere we can provide some value.

Of course.

Nothing okay.

Okay.

Uh so looking specifically at the on the audit side here, kind of some more details of our 2026 plan.

Um we are of course are already into it.

Um, you know, we've made some progress.

Um I will start with the second bullet and then move move on.

So as Vivian mentioned, our audit of the Office of Public Health and Safety Umgagement has completed.

As we have not released the report yet, we are very close to doing so.

It's literally the final final uh touches being put on it.

Um I'm hesitant to share too too many details in a public forum, but I will give you some kind of general takeaways that I think are are not uh incendiary in any way.

Um I would characterize the report as as not necessarily clean.

Uh there are a number of findings, I believe there are eight total findings, um, six of which we classified as high risk.

Uh the other two are moderate.

They these findings kind of fall across a number of areas um in terms of kind of risk, controls, um a lot of things that govern kind of operational processes, um, they generally are not up to the level that they they should be.

Um there are a lot of details within those, and I'm happy to kind of discuss any of those with you as as the report comes out, and once you have a take a chance to take a look at it.

Um I will say to OPHS's credit, they've you know undergone a tremendous amount of growth, especially over the audit period we did, which was 2020 through 2025, essentially, uh 24 and a little bit to 25.

Essentially, 24 and a little bit into 25.

And so we were able to see a lot of progress across that period.

You know, things have improved with different changes in processes and staffing and the like.

And to help uh encourage and make that sure that gets done, we're going, we're planning to do uh kind of a more, we always do like a follow-up of some sort to kind of make sure that the management responses that are put in there for how they're gonna address findings are being progress is being made against them, and that's one of the things you know we report back to you on kind of each October.

Um, but given the nature of some of the things that we found with OPHS, I think it's in their best in a benefit uh or in best interest if we do a more substantive kind of follow-up, um, which will take place later this this year once they're have another opportunity to kind of further implement some of the changes they've had.

So once I get through the slide, happy to take any questions on that, but just wanted to kind of put some details around that since I know we've been talking about it for a while and there's been some questions.

Umly, uh another tricky engagement is the is the audit of uh the human resources division.

Um this one again uh has kind of been ongoing for a little bit, and given some of the numerous changes that took place within that division, uh the it was a bit of a perfect storm in some ways, in that the timing of our kind of completion of our field work and you know, discussion of findings was right at the time a lot of major changes were taking place within HR, and they were actually implementing a number of things to directly address the findings that we had, not necessarily in response to what we had found.

Um they again the timing was close, but so those things were were ongoing and uh it was not reflective of the actual situation, I think, to release the report in the at that time based on the changes that were happening.

So in order to kind of fully resolve that, um, we are going to go back in this year and um do an update basically since we've we finished our field work, address some of those things, and it will not be a complete revision of kind of the report, but it will update it for all relevant activities that have taken place across the lifespan since it first uh commenced.

So that I believe will um give a much clearer picture of kind of where HR is that is at this point.

So those are obviously two more notable kind of audits that have been going on for the last couple years, and so uh just wanted to give the committee a little insight on kind of where those are and how our approaches to to finish those up.

And then additionally, um our audit team will plan to focus on a couple different areas.

Uh apologies again to Madam Controller for how this is presented.

Uh I think I gave her a little bit of a jump scare yesterday by having two OFM two OFM uh it's like three times on here.

Um so this the plan again, going back to our kind of our risk-based approach, um how the city county operates for various reasons.

There's just a tremendous amount of onus put on individual agencies and departments for compliance with a lot of these issues.

That is not to say that purchasing or grants or HR or any of those functions that kind of oversee a lot of different areas are not doing a good job or not doing their job, but just by the very nature of how much work and how many dollars are spent, it it's very difficult for some of those oversight agencies to really have an understanding of every single element that goes into every contract and every that goes to for OCC as well.

Um so while this is listed as OFM, it's not necessarily a direct audit or review of OFM purchasing or OFM grants.

It's more so how agencies and departments are doing on their third-party vendor compliance.

You know, are they holding vendors to the terms listed in the contracts?

Are they you know paying on expenses that are are clearly stated in the scopes of work and we're making sure there's continuity across all those issues?

Similarly with grants, you know, compliance is everything with grants.

Um there's a huge reputational risk if we're not compliant with our grants and we lose potential opportunities for funding and so on and so forth.

So again, we it was difficult to list this item without putting some sort of agency department with it.

We just generally tagged OFM because they have involvement throughout those processes, but the actual focus of kind of our work will be on specific agencies and departments and their activities within these purchasing and grant areas.

Any detailed questions on kind of the more detailed plan for 2026?

Yes, Counselor Boots.

I wasn't gonna ask a question, but now that you invited me.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm putting everybody on the spot.

Just briefly.

You said the uh uh audit report for OPHS is soon forthcoming.

Can you give us a little bit more of a definite timeline?

Yes, so candidly, our hope was to have it already out by by today.

Um and unfortunately that did not happen.

Uh the some of the OPHS leadership, um, again, we met with them, was it last week?

I believe, yeah, last week was our exit conference.

We're all in agreement, we're on the same page, and other uh leaders are on the same page as well.

So they literally just have some responses to edit, but they've been kind of out, they're key individuals that are doing those, and so um it will certainly be out by the end of March.

Yes.

Thank you.

Remind me if you will, Director Jones.

Do those re individual reports from the audit reports as they come out, are they sent to committee members or at least are committee members notified with a link or something to be able to review those reports?

Yes, yeah, I'm happy to send it directly to you.

It will be up on our website um shortly after the kind of key parties internally have had a chance to see it.

But um with this one, I'm happy to send it directly to the committee.

Yeah, I guess I'm asking not necessarily specifically for this one.

Sure.

I I'm asking more generically on whether or not those are sent directly to the committee members as they are published.

Yes, yeah, I think that's kind of best practice.

I won't make you go to the website or make you click the link.

So we'll we'll just send them directly as we finish reports, send them directly to the committee.

Thank you.

Sure.

All right.

That was kind of the the the meat of our our uh report again.

Just kind of a lot lot going on.

Um, and we're uh excited kind of about the progress and things that are being made, but there's a lot to tackle.

Um but we have a great team and great staff, and so we're looking forward to to continue to do that in 2026.

Other questions from committee members.

I will let the committee members know that I did um have a brief meeting with um the external auditors um just as a prep for as they were coming in.

You may have noticed that on the 25 when Deputy Director Agnew did the presentation of 2025, there was a presentation last March by four of us kind of saying here's what we're here's our plan.

Um this year we took it kind of as the chairman will take one for the team and the chairman will sit down with four of us and kind of talk about their plan and and make sure everything's going there.

So that did occur.

Uh we had we had a good discussion about what their plan is, very consistent uh to what they've done in the past.

So that has occurred.

They're they're ready to go and and look forward to the July meeting where when they'll come back to the committee and give us the results of the of the presentation.

So just wanted the committee to know that.

Any other thoughts, comments, questions, concerns?

I love efficient meetings.

We aim to please all right.

As a reminder, then our next meeting will be July 31st uh 2026, 9 a.m.

in room 221.

Main focus should be the um results of the external audit, um, which should be the focus of that meeting.

So and obviously if there's any issues that come up during that time frame or during the audit, if if um I mean I'm available if if you need any assistance from the committee, or we can certainly reach out to any committee members if if necessary.

Appreciate that.

Thanks.

All right, very good.

Can I have a motion on adjournment?

So moved second, been moved and seconded.

We are adjourned.

Thank you.