The Pike County Board is holding a budget hearing this evening to continue working on getting an audit.
Pike County was placed on the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s Do Not Pay List last week after Pike County continues to have issues with getting budget numbers corrected so an audit can take place.
WGEM reports that Pike County Clerk Natalie Roseberry says that the county board alerted auditors more than a year ago that the county needed help transitioning from their former payroll system, CIC to Paycom. Roseberry says the transfer of information required entering many years of data manually into the new payroll system.
Roseberry says many errors in the payroll system from the previous CIC system resulted in some employees not having correct Payed Time Off and overtime among other data. Roseberry says it’s because the county has never conducted a full blown payroll audit.
Roseberry told WGEM that the county paid accounting firm WIPFLI, $20,000 to help facilitate the transition back in January. In June, the firm alerted the Pike County Board that only one payroll out of 12 had been completed in the new system and they needed to teach the new system to the county to proceed forward. Roseberry said WIPFLI told them they could not complete the work due to staffing shortages stemming from COVID-19 and they underestimated the amount of work needed to transfer the old data over into the new payroll system would take. Roseberry said to resolve the lack of all the data being in the new system, WIPFLI attempted to train the county to proceed. However, Roseberry said the training was insufficient and numbers for a new budget continue to remain way off.
WIPFLI informed Pike County last Thursday that they were backing out of their 3-year contract with the county. WGEM says that WIPFLI has refused comment.
Pike County must now find new auditors for 2022 to get removed from the Do Not Pay list. Roseberry says that the Illinois Comptroller’s Office says that 18 other counties in the state are also facing similar issues.
The budget hearing will take place at 7 p.m. this evening in the upper courtroom of the Pike County courthouse in Pittsfield.