Olds College's administration said its books are now ready for inspection, after the auditor general of Alberta (AG) cited the school in February for not submitting timely and accurate financial reports.The 2013 reports are ready, but the school missed the chance to present them to the AG, said Jordan Cleland, vice-president of advancement at the college.The school's books will be audited this spring, he continued.In its February 2014 report, the AG stated that Olds College failed to submit “timely, accurate financial statements” for 2013. As a result, it did not complete auditing the school's accounting processes for that fiscal year.When the AG's report was released, administration accepted the findings and took responsibility for needed improvements, Cleland said.“We think his comments are reasonable and they're fair. There's nothing in there that we disagree with the office of the auditor general and what that means is that we accept them and we accept the responsibility to fix the areas that he commented on," Cleland said.Robert Driesen, the assistant AG who worked on the case, said financial reporting processes are fundamental to every organization and are paramount for good planning.“It will make sure that the decision-making that's being done by management and the board is using current and up-to-date information,” Driesen said. “So the longer that you go with some of those weaknesses, the more of an opportunity exists that you might make a decision that has incomplete information or things like that.”The AG has called on the college to “improve its processes and controls over year-end financial reporting” as far back as April 2011.Cleland said staff turnover in the school's business services department in 2012 led to the delay in preparing reports.Some workers went on extended leave and the school waited to see if they would return, in accordance with its equity policy, Cleland said.To rectify the issue, Cleland said the college brought a former chief financial officer out of retirement and hired Ernst and Young to review its accounting processes.According to board meeting minutes from December 2013, Public Sector Accounting Standards for such reporting were established.Also, the business services department is fully staffed with 10 workers for the first time in over two years, Cleland added.Driesen said it was a challenge for the college to fill vacancies in business services and catch up with its reporting while dealing with day-to-day operations."Hopefully you can appreciate that they're trying to get last year's financial reporting done while they still have all their day-to-day things for the current fiscal year that they're trying to do as well. So it's been a little bit of a challenge for them," he said.Olds College's limited resources contributed to those challenges, Cleland said.“We're a relatively small college and we don't have the luxury of having a staff of 15 or 20 or 25 accountants,” he said.The AG's 2014 report listed one additional outstanding recommendation for the college. That was to separate privileged system access from routine data entry.To do so, the college would need to periodically review user accounts with privileged access for validity, remove access from accounts that don't need it and establish a mechanism to verify data adjustments, Driesen said.He explained that those who perform routine data entry should not have privileged access, an IT role, where users can make changes to data or programs for the purpose of maintaining a system.“Those are two incompatible type processes, tasks,” Driesen said. “And if you have the same person doing that, it increases your exposure that somebody could either make a mistake or intentionally do something to adjust the records without people being able to notice it right away.”Cleland said the school has implemented the segregation of duties but did not provide further detail.Olds College was not the only post-secondary institution the AG was concerned with. The report urged both the Alberta College of Art and Design and Northern Lakes College to improve financial reporting processes.There were three schools in the report held up as models of improving financial reporting. They were NorQuest College, MacEwan University and Mount Royal University.When asked what they did right, Driesen said the audit committees at those schools held management accountable to make the necessary corrections."So they essentially indicated that you can come up with lots of excuses about what could prevent you from implementing some of these, they just decided not to accept that and that they wanted these things to be corrected."[email protected]
