State Financials: Presentability (and Accountability?) ‘Pending’
I don’t know how you, if you were trying to control state spending, could do anything with something like this, just issued by the Ohio Office of Budget and Management (OBM):
The OBM page linking to the PDF of its February 10 report for January 2008 is here.
The red-boxed item (”Pending Payroll”) represents payroll costs in the amount of $397 million that have yet to be “spread” to the various state agencies (and to units within those agencies). Pending Payroll is being generated because of some type of accounting conversion that’s been taking place, if I recall correctly, since July 1, the beginning of the State’s fiscal year. The new system is apparently not always able to assign payroll costs to the proper departments as they occur; anything that can’t be assigned automatically is thrown into “Pending.” Someone then has to slog through the pending transactions manually and make accounting entries to get the costs to the right place.
January’s Pending Payroll is $17.6 million higher than the $380 million reported in December, so unclassified transactions are coming in faster than they are being processed out. The OBM report text indicates that the sloggers are about two months behind.
Because of the Pending Payroll situation, every department looks like it’s staying within budget. Most of them probably are, because overall spending is $168.5 million under budget.
But given that the state’s financial situation is projected to go in the wrong direction to the tune of between $733 million and $1.9 billion (second item at link) in the next 18 months, you would want to try further belt-tightening, even in departments that are already doing a good job of holding the line.
But if you don’t have “clean” numbers, where do you start?
Perhaps someone from Ohio’s Old Media will take it upon themselves to ask OBM Director J. Pari Sabety, or even her boss Ted Strickland, how the State’s finances can be effectively managed when an important accounting objective (each recorded transaction is properly classified) is clearly not being achieved on a timely basis, month after month.
