The county’s audit issues have officially been corrected.

“My goal for our department is to have no audit findings in the future, and I think we’re heading in that direction,” Chief Financial Director Anita Radcliffe told the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners in the January meeting.

Radcliffe walked commissioners through finance department processes that corrected three findings in the 2015-16 audit by Carr, Riggs and Ingram, LLC. The previous fiscal year, the audit came back with 13 findings, which at the time was a worrisome prospect for county officials.

“All 13 of those findings have been corrected. … We did have three audit findings in the ’15-16 audit,” Radcliffe told commissioners. “Two of those were actually related to continuing to correct findings from the prior year.”

In the course of correcting the holdovers from the prior year, Radcliffe said staff found some unrecorded revenue — approximately $400,000.

“We ended up increasing our fund balance as a result of those prior-period adjustments,” Radcliffe said.

The third finding had to do with a handful of invoices mistakenly recorded in fiscal year 2017, instead of in 2016, and she has since taken measures to prevent such mistakes moving forward.

“There has been staff training and education within the finance department to ensure that that doesn’t happen in the future,” she said.

Radcliffe also gave a breakdown of county revenue and expenditures for the past several, as requested by Commissioner Hood Richardson.

From 2015 to 2016, revenue remained relatively consistent at approximately $56.6 million, however, spending did increase, Radcliffe said.

“The main things that contributed to this increase is an increased spending in Public Safety of $1.9 million, $1.5 million of which was implementing countywide EMS services,” Radcliffe said.

Radcliffe said the money represented the start-up costs, and did not reflect revenue from newly implemented or increased EMS service district taxes in some areas, along with third-party billing expected moving forward.

Overall, the county spent nearly $2 million of the fund balance, or reserved funds, but the $400,000 in found revenue from the prior fiscal year offset that number by $400,000. The $2 million was spent on the county’s purchase of the downtown First Bank building, a property that will be used to expand county offices, land adjoining Beaufort County Community College, implementing more security at the Beaufort County Courthouse and the purchase of land at Wright’s Creek to be used as public access in partnership with North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

Radcliffe went on to point out that the top revenues for the county come from: ad valorem taxes, at 55 percent; restricted funds from the state or federal government, at 22 percent; and the county’s share of collected sales tax, which makes up 14 percent of the county’s revenue.

While Beaufort County’s share of tax revenue dropped by $400,000 from 2014-15 to 2015-16, revenue from the state and federal government increased by approximately the same amount. However, ad valorem tax revenue collected decreased by $690,000.

“This drop is due to a drop in the business personal property values of the county’s largest taxpayer,” Radcliffe said.

The county’s largest taxpayer is PotashCorp-Aurora.

Radcliffe said the county’s biggest areas of spending are education, human services and public safety, which represent approximately $44.5 million, or 70 percent of the county budget.