Welcome to business session.

Our first item is approval of minutes from our last business session, which will be May 25th.

Is there a motion?

So moved.

Second.

We moved and seconded.

All in favor indicate by saying aye.

Aye.

All opposed.

Motion passes.

We have a series of audit presentations from the people's auditor.

Uh sir.

Please proceed.

Good afternoon, Mayor Lucas, members of City Council and City Manager Platt, Doug Jones, City Auditor.

We normally report on the performance of other city departments, programs, and activities, but today I have a report on our performance over the last fiscal year.

In front of you are copies of the annual report and presentation slides, and you should have also received an email with those as well.

City Auditors' authority and duties as an independent audit function and mandate to audit city government and provide information to the mayor and city council are established in the city charter.

The city auditor is appointed by and reports to the mayor and city council.

The city auditor is independent of the city manager.

The city charter grants the auditor complete access to the books, records, and employees of city government.

Additionally, state statutes authorize the city auditor to audit the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.

Our mission is based on our charter mandate as well as the government auditing standards.

We accomplish our mission through performance audits conducted in accordance with those standards and our core values of accountability, transparency, integrity, and professionalism that guide our work as government auditors.

The primary benefit of audits of our audits is providing essential public accountability and transparency over government programs and activities.

Other benefits include reduced or avoided costs, increased revenues, improved city services to residents and employees, information to facilitate decision making, and improve safeguards over public monies and assets.

In fiscal year 2023, we issued seven performance audits, one more than our goal that strengthens city government's public accountability and transparency and made recommendations to improve city operations.

Last year we assessed whether the police department spent the community policing and prevention fund as intended by the council.

These were quarterly audits directed by the council.

Whether short-term rentals impact city convention and tourism taxes and fees.

This audit was based on public audit suggestions.

We also looked at short-term rental host compliance with city permit regulations.

Again, this was a public audit suggestion.

Whether city departments removed and replaced trees in a way that supports the city's tree canopy goals, and whether water services provides resources to customers to help address unexpected high water use.

These audits took an average of 654 hours to complete.

Very brief summaries of these audits are on page five of the annual report.

The online report includes links to those reports.

In addition to the audits, we issued two administrative reports last year to the mayor and city council and the public to let the them know and the public know about our activities and performance.

Our audits can have potential direct financial impacts on city government through recommendations and information to reduce, avoid, or recover costs, as well as increase revenues.

The potential direct financial impact of the audits we issued last fiscal year was about 14.3 million dollars.

Our audits can also have potential indirect financial impacts, suggesting ways the city could improve the delivery of services to the public and employees and ensure appropriate controls are in place to manage or protect public monies or assets.

Last year we provided information on how nearly 23.8 million dollars in public monies and assets are used or managed.

Our expenditures for fiscal year 2023 were about 1.2 million.

So overall, for every dollar we spent last year, our work identified about $32 in potential direct and indirect financial impacts.

These come from implementing the recommendations, which cannot be effective without management support to measure the effectiveness of recommendations we make.

Our goal is to achieve management agreement with 90% of our audit recommendations at the time of the audit is released.

Last year we made 27 recommendations and management agreed or agreed in part with 80% of them.

We also have a goal for 75% of our recommendations to be implemented within two years of when an audit is released.

So by fiscal year 2023, management reported implementing about 70% of our fiscal year 2021 audit recommendations.

We were honored to receive a national award for the second time in three years.

The Association of Local Government Auditors awarded a 2022 distinguished night and award for best performance audit in the medium shop category to our December 2022 audit that evaluated short-term rental permit compliance.

In addition to the judge's comment on this slide, they also noted immediately the reader understood the importance of the audit results, a potential revenue loss of a million dollars and only a 7% compliance rate.

Communicating the results of our work is part of our mission and promotes transparency about what we do as well as the work of city government.

We do this by publishing our audit reports on our website, publicly presenting these reports, talking to residents about our work at the city's community engagement university, council member constituent meetings, as well as neighborhood association meetings.

We also ask the public for their audit suggestions, and we use our Twitter account to help keep the public informed about audits we're releasing, information about submitting a recommendation or a suggestion to do an audit, and more information about our work.

The professional audit staff are highly qualified, holding master's degrees in fields such as business, health, or public administration, accounting, economics, and psychology.

Three staff have one or more of the certifications shown on this slide.

As an office, we have 103 years of audit experience, almost all of it auditing Kansas City government.

Between August and between April of 2020 and January 2023, we lost four audit staff members with a little more than 100 years of audit experience due to retirements.

Filling those vacancies and rebuilding our audit experience and capacity has been a challenge.

It took many months during the last fiscal year before we successfully hired two new auditors, one in December 2022 and one in February 2023.