During last night’s city council meeting Todd Burchett and Anthony DeBenedictis of BKD LLP, the full service accounting firm handling the forensic audit for the City of Port Arthur, shared their findings with council.
Citizens will recall, back in February of 2015 a strong push by concerned citizens to have the city conduct a forensic audit of the City of Port Arthur financial records. Claims of improper handling over city finances and fraud were at the core of these concerns. Resulting in a petition signed by more than 1,400 citizens, forced the Port Arthur City Council to agree to conduct the forensic audit. This audit began in May of 2015.
Over the past two years, the firm BKD LLP has conducted the audit of all financial records for the City of Port Arthur. Including, but not limited to, Parks and Recreation, Public Works, Human Resources and City Yards. They also looked at allegations of misuse of travel expense policies, P-Card misuse, expenses for Pleasure Island, water collections and police department vehicle misuse.
Burchett and DeBenedictis stated during their presentation that they exhausted all leads throughout the audit and could find nothing that would allow them to recommend direct legal action on any current or former employee, city council member or management at the city level.
To date, the city has spent more than $220,000 to find that citizens’ concerns were not realized. They did this with money that could have easily been used for other areas of importance across the city. Although we understand there were findings of “not following policies” at some levels, there were absolutely zero findings of fraud.
It is our hope that these results can now allow for trust between the city and citizens of Port Arthur to grow and strengthen.
We also expect that those individuals who brought us to this point by pushing the original claims of fraud, improper handling of city finances, filing for the petition, and misinforming more than 1,400 citizens who signed the petition, to also show their support for our city government. As the facts shared last night prove, the City of Port Arthur and those targeted by the audit have been grossly inaccurate.