Inaccurate Billing Led To Solid Waste Shortfall
 | Author:
Linda Kent, MT43 News Staff Reporter
MT43 News Correspondent |
Linda Kent
MT43 News Staff Reporter
A Solid Waste Advisory Board (SWAB) subcommittee report dated April 9, found that between fiscal years 2021 and 2022, the number of assessments billed to county property owners declined by more than 10 percent – from 3,168 assessments billed in fiscal 2021 to 2,713 assessments in fiscal 2022. The total number of assessments in fiscal 2023 remained flat.
“Up until this year, we knew we had a shortfall in the revenues, . . . but we didn’t know exactly why,” County Executive Administrator Bill Jarocki said at the April 17 Broadwater County Commission meeting.
In March, SWAB set a subcommittee, called the Tiger Team, to dig into the issue.
“Our work showed that there were several factors that led to information not being updated in our accounting software,” Jarocki said. “We have to transfer information from one year to the next. Assessment information for 2021 was not transferred as the base information for fiscal 2022.”
The software then defaulted to one assessment per property, creating a problem because businesses may have 20 or more assessments tied to their property tax bills. The majority of the decline came from business assessments, which dropped from 470 to 233 for fiscal year 2022, then to 232 for the fiscal year that ended in June 2023.
The result was a shortfall of approximately $150,000 for 2022-23 against a budget of $647,500. For the previous fiscal year, the enterprise fund’s operating deficit was around $95,000.
The report identified several causes for the failure to correctly transfer assessment information from 2021 to 2022, including the impacts of COVID on the workplace, and the requirements of the county’s billing software.
The report emphasized that current treasurer’s department staff was not involved in the events that caused the problem. Jarocki also told commissioners that a new process will be in place for solid waste to review property assessments provided to the county before they are entered into the accounting software.
Jarocki asked county commissioners on SWAB’s behalf for permission to attempt to recover some of the missing assessment money through a voluntary program. The board is also working on several models for collecting solid waste revenue in future years. Those models will be discussed at an April 30 public meeting of the board.
