Sharon Lechner served as Anchorage’s chief financial officer under mayors Mark Begich and Matt Claman, and director of the Office of Management and Budget for the last eight months of Mayor Dave Bronson’s tenure. “That’s exactly how we like our books,” Assembly Chair Chris Constant quipped.
She and the city’s independent auditors both say there’s no evidence of fraud in the city’s books. Her point was about risk and failure to heed warnings. “I don’t have holidays,” she said. “We absolutely have to get this out because my last day is June 30.”this lateare typically hundreds of pages long, filled with dry financial statements, lengthy notes on those statements, and, ideally, an independent auditor’s opinion that the city’s bookkeeping fairly and accurately reflects its finances, in line with professional accounting standards.
“We’ll never have perfect books,” Lechner said. “We’re too big and too complex. But I do think that it would behoove our community for the Assembly to have more information available to it, right? I mean, what’s wrong with having timely, accurate information?”the city made in 2011. Explaining how this went under the radar gets technical, but basically, Lechner says there were errors around how the expense was allocated to various city departments.
“And in the United States, there are only five states’ PERS programs that are fully funded, and ours is definitely not one of them,” Lechner said.Other accounting failures related to the city’s workers’ compensation fund have obscured what Lechner said is now an exponentially growing deficit, on the order of $33 million. The city hasn’t been putting enough in to cover its employees’ claims for years.
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