Audit Objective
Did the South Hornell Fire Protection Company, Inc. (Company) Executive Board (Board) and membership ensure disbursements were supported, appropriate and authorized?
Audit Period
January 1, 2024 – August 6, 2025
Understanding the Audit Area
A fire company board should ensure that disbursements have adequate supporting documentation and are for appropriate company purposes before payment to safeguard company resources. A fire company board should establish a system of internal controls that consists of written policies and procedures and clearly defined bylaws that help ensure that officials properly record and authorize disbursements. When allowing officials and company members to make purchases using debit cards, the board should ensure that adequate controls are in place to prevent the risk of unauthorized debit card use.
The Company’s 302 disbursements totaled $300,953 for the period January 1, 2024 through May 31, 2025.
Audit Summary
The Board and membership did not ensure all disbursements were supported, appropriate and authorized. The lack of an adequate Company constitution and bylaws (bylaws), financial policies and procedures, debit card safeguards and periodic review and documented authorization of disbursements significantly hindered the Board’s and membership’s ability to ensure disbursements were supported, appropriate and authorized.
In addition, the Recording Secretary (Secretary) generally did not record the membership’s authorization of disbursements at monthly meetings in the membership minutes and there were no minutes for nine membership meetings. As a result, 300 disbursements totaling $297,853 did not have documented authorization. We also could not determine whether 63 disbursements totaling $126,012 were appropriate Company expenses because they lacked adequate supporting documentation.
The report includes eight recommendations that, if implemented, will improve Company officials’ ability to safeguard disbursements. Company officials were given an opportunity to respond to our findings and recommendations within 30 days of the receipt of the draft report, but they did not respond.
We conducted this audit pursuant to Article V, Section 1 of the State Constitution and the State Comptroller’s authority as set forth in Article 3 of the New York State General Municipal Law. Our methodology and standards are included in Appendix B.
The Board has the responsibility to initiate corrective action. We encourage the Board to prepare a written corrective action plan (CAP) that addresses the recommendations in this report and forward it to our office within 90 days. For more information on preparing and filing your CAP, please refer to our brochure, Responding to an OSC Audit Report, which you received with the draft audit report. We encourage the Board to make the CAP available for public review.