Shiprock officials confident 2008 audit issues have been corrected
SHIPROCK
The Shiprock Chapter has upwards of $750,000 sitting in tribal accounts that it can’t use.
The money has been appropriated to the chapter over the past four years but because of sanctions that were put in place in 2011 by the Navajo Nation’s Budget and Finance Committee, 10 percent of all funds appropriated to the chapter have been held back.
The reason stems from an audit done by the tribe’s Office of the Auditor General on the chapter’s finances in 2011. This was actually a follow-up audit of one performed several years before which found a number of serious problems with the way the chapter handled its finances.
“It was pretty bad,” said Duane “Chili” Yazzie, the chapter’s current president, in talking about that 2008 audit.
The auditors found problems in almost every area of the chapter’s accounting system back in 2008.
“The chapter’s internal control structure is weak,” according to that audit report.
“Chapter funds were disbursed without community approval resulting in unauthorized expenditures,” the audit added.
As part of the audit, the auditors examined $74,000 of the chapter’s expenditures as a sample and found that 84 percent of those funds – some $60,000 – were questionable for one reason or another.
“Furthermore, the chapter cannot provide reasonable assurance that all property and equipment owned and controlled by the chapter was accounted for and safeguarded against loss or misuse,” the audit stated.
Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow