In a dizzying three months, Alabama Today has reported on the curious case of delayed annual audits and the secret forensic audit being done in the most roundabout way using the least transparent process possible. The firm brought in was Kroll, which was the City Attorney’s law firm, seemingly hired to evade public record laws so that the city could claim privileged communication even when there wasn’t. We still need answers on the funding or cost of the report.
Mayor Frank Brocato finally addressed the issue in a council meeting on August 5, 2024. At the next meeting, an investigator with Kroll came to speak and laid out the basics of the investigation.
The final report was made public in an early evening Friday press release with a headline intended to discourage a deeper investigation. That worked somewhat, as several local media outlets ran the city’s spin as fact.
If you’re looking for the cliff notes version of the report, I created a Top 10 List; that said, I still encourage you to review the document in full on your own to understand the significance of what has been bubbling up behind the surface of the city for years.
Reading the report, I was struck by the lack of leadership and accountability from the mayor in the city’s tone-deaf response (which, in all fairness, is better than silence). The ongoing problems were not a secret to anyone in the building. Filling the staffing levels cited in the report would fall under the purview of the Mayor and yet in his annual budget requests he never sought to do so. Instead, he repeated the line of how great things under his watch are and have been.
This begs the question: Who runs things at the City of Hoover? Has the mayor abdicated his role to the CFO and City Manager while he’s been busy being a ribbon cutter, cheerleader, and sweetheart deal maker for his pet priority projects?
There are strong contradicting messages from the Kroll report and Brocato and BMSS, the company responsible for the city’s annual audits throughout the years.
Brocato stressed in his update that “the annual audits have been sound and thorough.” Every CFO has touted winning the GFOA award for 41 years in a row. According to their website, “GFOA established the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting Program (COA) in 1945 to encourage and assist state and local governments to go beyond the minimum requirements of generally accepted accounting principles to prepare annual comprehensive financial reports that evidence the spirit of transparency and full disclosure and then to recognize individual governments that succeed in achieving that goal.”
Here’s the last sentence of the description, “The goal of the program is not to assess the financial health of participating governments, but rather to ensure that users of their financial statements have the information they need to do so themselves.”
If it took one of the world’s most qualified and sought-after firms over three months to begin to make sense of the City of Hoover’s financial mess, one has to question how the Mayor can say with a straight face that the city has met the program’s goal.
In order to receive this award, there is a forty-four-page checklist that has to be completed by the city attesting to a strict adherence to best practices in financial reporting.
Kroll’s report details years of staffing, software, and policy problems that led to misinformation being presented in many ways over the years. Perhaps there’s an award out there for hiding information and finger-pointing that the city could win, given this report.
At the last council meeting, the current CFO touted that Hoover had won yet another award for its financial practices, and in fact, it did. Still, that award and others were awarded during Tina Bolt’s time there.
So, which was it? Were things a mess and disaster because of her actions? Did she inherit the mess and pass it down, or was it a combination?
Hopefully, this is the beginning of the light being shed on what’s going on behind the scenes in Hoover, and the revelations will continue.
