Posted on 08/15/2006 8:01:15 PM PDT by coconutt2000
By Fili Sagapolutele
Samoa News Correspondent
American Samoa's "high risk" designation by the U.S. Department of Interior will not be lifted anytime soon even though the FY2005 audit was submitted on time.
"One of the conditions for lifting the high-risk designations is that the ASG have two consecutive years of timely, clean single audit reports," DOI's deputy director for Insular Areas, Papali'i David B. Cohen told Samoa News by e-mail from Washington late last week. "The fiscal year 2005 audit was timely, but not clean. It therefore cannot be counted towards the lifting of the high-risk designation."
"That does not mean, however, that the ASG is not continuing to make progress," he said. "We give the ASG credit for getting the audit completed on time and remain hopeful that next year's audit will be clean as well as timely."
Cohen said DOI's Office of Insular Affairs (OIA) "will continue to work with the ASG to help improve its internal control procedures and its overall financial management processes."
"These improvements would in turn improve the reliability of its financial data, which in turn, hopefully, would result in clean auditor opinions," he said, responding to Samoa News questions.
Cohen said the auditors issued a qualified opinion for FY 2005 similar to that for fiscal year 2004 audit. RC Holsinger Associates based in Wexford, Pennsylvania carried out the independent audit.
Marina T. Tinitali, Accountability Policy & Audit Liaison Officer for OIA, said the "auditors' opinions of the financial statements for FY 2004 and FY 2005 were basically identical, although the ASG was able to clear one FY 2004 qualification."
"In the audit of FY 2004 the auditors expressed a qualification on physical inventory records," Tinitali explained. "This qualification was resolved and, therefore, does not appear in the audit of FY 2005. The resolution of qualifications is necessary in order to help 'clean' the opinion in subsequent years and validates the progress that the ASG is making."
Earlier this year, the FY 2004 audit was released to DOI. And while ASG has made improvements in this area, there are still some problems that were identified by independent auditors.
For one, the auditors had problems verifying the data contained in the financial statements.
"Due to material qualifications, the independent auditors were unable to express opinions on several of the basic financial statements," OIA director Nikolao Pula told Samoa News in May this year.
The FY 2004 audit states that ASG ended the year with a surplus.
Meanwhile, the Procurement Office issued a July 26 request for proposals (RFP) for ASG's 'Financial and Single Audits" beginning with FY2006 and ending FY2010.
The RFP requires each annual financial and single audit be completed and submitted to the Federal Clearing House by April 30 of the year following the audit period.
The deadline to submit proposals is August 16 at 2pm local time.
RC Holsinger was awarded the contract in late 2001 to audit ASG's financial statements from FY1998 through to FY2004. FY2005 was later added to the list, according to Samoa News' archives.
Reach the reporter at fili@samoanews.com
Boy this sure sounds important. Should I be worried?
No need to worry. Business as usual continues. Theft from public coffers is unabated.
I see. Some fiduciary malfeasance afoot. That's all over my head. Hope they catch them.
Does this mean everything is A-OK, SNAFU, FUBAR or we are SOL?
Give them independence already
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