Talk:North Carolina State Auditor/GA1

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Reviewer: Hog Farm (talk · contribs) 14:02, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As an auditor myself, I'll look at this. Hog Farm _Talk 14:02, 5 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• "As of June 2022, the department has 134 employees" - source is now current through August and the figure is 136 at that point
  • Updated.
• " The state auditor compiles the state's comprehensive annual financial report and" - it's not the CAFR anymore, it's technically known as the "annual comprehensive financial report". Name was changed recently due to the common pronunciation of CAFR sounding too much like this
  • Yikes, hadn't thought of that. Renamed accordingly with newer source as confirmation.
• Based on the gap from 1865 to 1868, was the office vacant between the end of the Civil War and the readmission of NC? If so, might be worth mentioning in the history section
  • Good point, added that the office was abolished in 1865 per the NC Manual. As for the context of this, I'm not quite sure. While researching the North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction I found a source which said that on April 25, 1865 the state declared all of its top offices vacant due to the surrender of the Confederacy. I found a source for that article which explicitly says the General Assembly abolished the Superintendent post shortly thereafter, so it's possible that the legislature did the same thing to the auditor, since it was implied in some sources that the office was created in part to keep track of things during the trying times of war. The NC Manual is not specific on the terms under which the office of auditor was terminated, so I guess this will have to do.
• I guess the one major question I have is does the auditor's office also conduct audits of local and county-level organizations? The state of Missouri conducts audits of local governments by petition and will do audits of county governments for counties that can't get a private company to do the audit. If that's a practice in NC as well, recommend mentioning it
  • Counties and municipalities in North Carolina are required by law in NC to have audits done annually and submit them to the Local Government Commission (of which the state auditor is a member) but these are regularly done either by an internal auditor or a contracted CPA (see here). The office does do special investigative audits (see here for investigative audits) of local governments from time to time, and I presume this is because NC is a
    Dillon's rule state where counties and municipalities are legally "creatures of the state" and they almost always receive state funds one way or another, which the auditor is allowed to chase after. In the past year or two there have been scandals as a result of the NC Auditor's office discovering massive public funds embezzlement in the towns of Spring Lake and East Laurinburg
    (this town's charter was unprecedently revoked by the Local Government Commission due to this), but this was only done because the towns were not submitting their own regular audit reports to the LGC in violation of state law. So in summary, the state auditor can audit local governments if there is a reason to, but does not regularly do so. I think the current text in the article makes allowance for this.
• Source link for File:Samuel F. Phillips.jpg is dead
  • I think the analogous version is here, it as a similar photo. I don't know if its really a US gov photo (probably a privately-commissioned production is my guess, considering the age). I tried to look for other photos definitively published before 1927 but couldn't find any; I'll remove it if you think that's best.
    • Probably going to need to either remove it then, as I agree there's some doubt about the accuracy of that tag. Hog Farm _Talk 13:13, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]
      • Removed.
• Spot-checked some sources, no issues, all look good enough for reliability standpoint

Good work, placing on hold. Hog Farm _Talk 02:44, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• @Hog Farm: I've responded to your comments. Glad to have a true CPA on this! If I was good at math, I would've considered the profession myself, but alas, complicated numbers in the abstract hurt my brain. -Indy beetle (talk) 05:07, 7 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]