County Commissioner's Office

County Talk
By
Lamar Paris - Commissioner

Q. Why does Union County not publish a financial statement as required under state code OCGA 36-1-6?
A. The simple answer is that we did not know it was required. Several years ago the government finance law was rewritten and the new law all counties now comply with is OCGA 36-81-1. The old law, (OCGA 36-1-6), was adopted in 1952 and is considered to be superseded by OCGA 36-81-1 in all training that county finance officers and commissioners receive from both the Association of County Commissioners (ACCG) and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government. Union County has always complied with OCGA 36-81-1, which is the provision of the law dealing with local government budgets and audits.

Union County provides an annual audit as required by Ga Code 36-81-1 which contains the majority of the information required in 36-1-6 and a whole lot more. The audit is delivered to the public at a county meeting and presented by the county auditors. In addition, a summary report of this information is printed by the local newspaper. The audit itself is available at any time to the public, free of charge.

Many county finance departments, including ours, were apparently under the impression that publication of the county audit, public hearings discussing the county budget, printing of the budget in the newspaper, and the fact that any citizen can request any financial information any time, was adequate for compliance of reporting of financial information. Union County has never received an audit exception or notification from the state that we were not in compliance of our financial reporting-all of which is confirmed by our auditors.

The Association of County Commissioners view is that the new comprehensive budget and audit law (OCGA 36-81-1) supersedes the 1952 (OCGA 36-6-1) law since it covers the same subject matter in a more detailed fashion. However, since the old law has never been officially removed from the books, to be technically correct, our county attorney suggest that we begin providing the report as per OCGA 36-6-1.

The Commissioner’s office regrets that we had no prior knowledge of this reporting requirement, as has been the case in most counties. We have suggested to the Carl Vinson Institute of Government and ACCG to consider making this information available in the future to all counties or requesting that the legislature remove OCGA 36-6-1 from the state books. We are not aware of any financial information required from the Commissioner’s office in this report that is not available in the annual audit report.

We are currently preparing this report and hope to publish it within three weeks.

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