| Public Release Date: March 12, 1999 | No. 99-16 |
The State Treasurer is a constitutional officer elected by the citizens of Minnesota to a four-year term. Michael A. McGrath served as State Treasurer from January 1987 until January 1999. On January 4, 1999, Carol Johnson was sworn in as the new State Treasurer. During the November 1998 elections, the voters of Minnesota approved a constitutional amendment abolishing the Office of the State Treasurer effective at the conclusion of Carol Johnson's current four-year term. The Office of the State Treasurer provides banking services for most state agencies. This function includes cash control, receipt processing, and warrant redemption. In addition, the office makes debt service payments on outstanding general obligation bonds and collects various fees and assessments transmitted from the 87 counties. The State Treasurer also serves as a member of the State Board of Investment, the Minnesota State Retirement System Board, and the Executive Council.
Our work in the Office of the State Treasurer is completed as part of our annual Statewide Audit. Our audit scope focused on those areas material to the State of Minnesota's financial statements, including state depository cash control and debt service expenditures. In addition, we expanded our audit scope beyond Statewide Audit objectives to review the Office of the State Treasurer's revenue collections and administrative expenditures for the period July 1, 1997, to December 31, 1998.
We qualified our report, dated December 1, 1998, on the State of Minnesota's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report because insufficient audit evidence exists to support the State of Minnesota's disclosures with respect to the year 2000. Auditing the state's year 2000 compliance efforts was not an objective of this audit. As a result, we do not provide assurance that the Office of the State Treasurer is or will be year 2000 ready, that its year 2000 remediation efforts will be successful in whole or in part, or that parties with which the Office of the State Treasurer does business will be year 2000 ready. We concluded that internal controls over the areas reviewed provide reasonable assurance that assets were adequately safeguarded, and transactions were authorized and properly reported in the accounting records. We also concluded that the office complied with material legal provisions related to the areas reviewed, except that the Office of the State Treasurer needs to improve controls over travel costs.
The Office of the State Treasurer agreed with our recommendation and will take corrective action to resolve the situation.
