HARLINGEN — After four months of debate, city commissioners are holding off on hiring an auditing firm to gauge the city management’s efficiency and effectiveness.
Instead, Mayor Pro Tem Richard Uribe’s requesting new City Manager Gabriel Gonzalez review the operations of the city’s departments.
Since June, members of the commission’s new majority have been considering hiring a firm to conduct a so-called performance audit gauging the city management’s operations, which could cost $45,000 to $75,000, an official with the company Baker Tilly told commissioners.
“I’m looking to see if there are any improvements to efficiency that we can make to the departments,” Gonzalez said Monday.
At City Hall, he’s picked the public works department to conduct his first review.
“That’s one of the biggest ones,” he said, referring to the numerous departments the city operates, many of which he oversaw during his tenure as assistant city manager for internal affairs.
Now, Gonzalez is waiting on the hire of the city’s internal auditor to help conduct the departments’ reviews.
“That’s what they do,” he said, referring to the internal auditor’s job of reviewing departments’ efficiencies and effectiveness. “They review all policy and procedures and make suggestions for improvements if necessary. They also look at services the departments provide and look at ways to implement cost savings.”
Request for internal department review
Last week, Uribe requested Gonzalez review the departments’ operations before commissioners decide whether they’ll hire a firm to conduct a performance audit.
“I wanted to give Gabe a chance to go through all the departments,” Uribe told commissioners during Wednesday’s meeting. “I wanted to get his recommendations to give him a chance to look at what deficiencies he thinks we may have and maybe either provide us with different options or at least give us his recommendation for direction if we choose to hire an auditing firm.”
Before the meeting, commissioners reviewed presentations from three auditing firms which former Internal Auditor Danny Coyle picked from a list of six companies submitting proposals for the job.
Booth Management Consulting
During a presentation, Robin Booth, a certified public accountant with Booth Management Consulting, a Columbia, MD., firm with offices in Texas, said her company’s experience includes conducting financial, compliance, operational and investigative audits.
Booth said much of her firm’s experience includes work for federal agencies, some of which have requested the auditing of state and municipal governments.
Ernst & Young
During a presentation from London-based Ernst & Young, Mona Rupani, a CPA with the firm’s Houston office, said the company’s experience includes conducting compliance, investigative and financial audits.
“An audit can be something very short like a virtual, quick desk-top review or all the way to the other end, which would be an end-to-end deep … process where we do lots of interviews, lots of data analytics and also sample testing,” Neill Masterson, managing director for the firm’s risk consulting team in Austin, told commissioners.
Baker Tilly
During a presentation from Baker Tilly, a Chicago-based company, David Eisenlohr, the managing director for the firm’s Dallas office, said the company’s experience includes city audits.
“We know local government — it’s what we do,” he told commissioners. “We’re a full-service broadly capable of meeting the kinds of needs that a municipality of your size might undertake. From very traditional focus areas of audits through organizational performance improvement, which we understand performance audit is your principal objective here, we have the capability to really dive into any area of concern that the commission or the management of the city might have.”
In response to Mayor Chris Boswell’s question, Stacey Gill, a senior manager at the firm’s Austin office, said average performance audit costs range from $40,000 to $75,000.
“When it’s kind of those organization-wide performance audits where you’re looking at multiple departments and multiple areas, it would usually fall in that $45,000 to $75,000 range,” she said.
