Thread by @kennethmejiaLA

You know WHY it's important to have a CPA as City Controller, the city's accountant & auditor? 🤔

Here's a great story from today while reviewing the City of LA's new FY2022-23 budget. I noticed that the numbers were off in the "Unrestricted Revenue" section. So I did a thing.🔎

Here was the issue in the "Unrestricted Revenue" section🔎:

• The FY2021-22 numbers in the new budget didn't match the FY2021-22 numbers in the previous budget (the city used FY2020-21 by accident)

(The 1st image is from the new budget. The 2nd image is the previous budget)

I reached out directly to the CAO's office to tell them about this and long story short, they said:

"Thanks for calling that to my attention... We should have it resolved in a little bit"

I looked at the new budget again in the "Unrestricted Revenue" section and they fixed it!

How does this relate to being a CPA w/ accounting/auditing experience? 🤔

When you audit a company's financial statements and it shows a 2-year side by side analysis, one of FIRST audit procedures is to tie prior year numbers with prior year documents. Why is this important?

This is important because when financial statement users or in this case, Angelenos, like yourself, review city finance docs, you might make decisions based on incorrect information.

This is WHY it's important to have a City Controller w/ audit experience, better yet, a CPA! 😉

If we didn't catch this mistake, Angelenos reading this section would have thought that the "Unrestricted Revenue" budget for the LAPD decreased by $57M this upcoming fiscal year.

HOWEVER, the truth is that the LAPD's "Unrestricted Revenue" budget is INCREASING by $71M.

#CPA 😎