Last Monday, the City of Hoover held its regularly scheduled city council meeting, during which the city’s chief financial officer, Jennifer Cornett, spoke. In response to a request from Councilman Derrick Murphy, she presented an update and plan for remedying some of the concerns from the secretly commissioned forensic audit conducted by the nationally renowned firm Kroll.
The presentation addressed some of the top issues but still left many questions. Residents have been asking these questions in earnest for months now at council meetings, as they’ve come across elected officials out locally and through petitions and phone calls. Yet, week after week, they’ve found that the mayor and council president rebuffs their concerns. Denying them answers or a venue to be provided answers.
Three critical questions come to mind: first, why won’t city leadership create an open forum to address start to finish the legitimate questions that have been asked and ignored? This forum has been suggested not just by concerned residents but by Councilman Steve McClinton as well.
Second, how can residents be sure these problems will be prevented in the future, not just in the Finance Department but also in other departments within the city? We know from the Kroll report and several former members of the council that the information was known to Hoover’s top, namely Mayor Frank Brocato and Council President John Lyda, yet worse than just being ignored, they were seemingly covered up and denied. Why did the checks and balances between the mayor’s office and the city council fail? How do voters prevent that failure in the future as well?
Additionally, no one in the city has addressed the limitations described in the forensic audit, and if additional steps need to be taken to examine this administration and their financial dealings, departmental staffing beyond the Finance Department, and other issues brought to light through this process. Kroll described on Page 1 of their report, “In performing our forensic accounting and review and analysis of the Finance Department operations, we had certain limitations in our scope of review including a lack of accurate financial reports available from Munis and potentially thousands of electronic files that were deleted without any audit trail or definitive indication of who may have been responsible.”
The Kroll report was 274 pages long. Cornett’s update included 7 PowerPoint slides. This leaves a lot of ground to be covered by city leadership, one would hope that would include those responsible.
The sections in the Cornett report:
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Erroneous Financial Reporting
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Deleted, Missing and/or Destroyed Records
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Understaffed Finance Department
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Lack of Experience/Training in Payroll and General Ledger Division
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Lack of Training, Skills & Communication
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Lack of Formal Policies and Procedures
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MUNIS Accounting & Software Implementation
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Fluctuations in Finance Department Budget
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Budget Presentations
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Lack of Complete and Timely Reconciliations
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Unaddressed Payroll Issues
- Summary
Cornett described four of the issues addressed in these sections as having been resolved through subsequent actions, marking them as “closed” in her presentation. Among the issues marked as “closed,” however, are the deletion of files that she and the mayor have said were reported to the State’s Attorney General. When asked, William Califf, a spokesman from Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office, said, “It is the longstanding policy of this office to neither confirm nor deny the possibility of an investigation.”
The Hoover Channel, the local YouTube channel created by Robin Schultz and his grandson Jackson Schultz, loaded the video of her full update to its page as a part of its newest segment type, “The Week in Review.” You can also find within the description of the video all of the supporting and backup documents, including the detailed PowerPoint presentation that Cornett gave.
