The Ceres City Council has finally approved an audit of its 2023-24 fiscal year financial statements for the period ended in June 30, 2024.

The actions came months later than the city wanted, partly because of a change in staff.

Finance director Vanessa Portillo said the audit is an “important part of our financial accountability and transparency, and it reflects the work completed to ensure our records and reporting meet the standards expected for this organization.”

The city received the audit on Oct. 25 right as Shannon Esenwein resigned to be closer to family. Portillo officially became finance director in December and admitted ‘”it is been a very busy six months and we are back here at the council bringing the fiscal year ‘24 audit.”

She commended the city’s finance team for their hard work and professionalism throughout the audit process.

The Dublin firm of JJACPA, Inc. performed the audit and gave the city an unmodified opinion, also known as a clean audit. An unmodified opinion indicates that the financial statements, taken as a whole, appear to be presented fairly. An unmodified opinion is the highest level of opinion that can be expressed on audited financial statements.

Councilman James Casey cast the lone vote against accepting the report citing two reasons.

“Our agenda this week was well over 2,000 pages, and I concentrated mostly on the development part of it,” said Casey, referring to the Copper Trails master plan. “I haven’t had a chance to accurately review the audit.”

Casey also noted that his calls for a forensic audit have gone unanswered “so for those reasons, I’ll be voting no against accepting this audit.”

JJACPA noted that: “Although we ultimately received full cooperation of management and believe that we were given direct and unrestricted access to the city’s officials and senior management, we experienced significant difficulties in the performance of the audit owing to the failure of the city’s accounting personnel to prepare the requested audit schedules as initially agreed.”

“These difficulties in receiving incomplete or inaccurately prepared audit schedules, or not receiving the requested audit schedules at all, significantly added to the time and related cost of the audit.”

City management agreed with the auditor’s finding that a weakness existed due to noncompliance due to prolonged resource constraints within the Finance Department, turnover in key accounting positions, challenges associated with the ERP system implementation, and delays in reconciling certain major balance sheet accounts.