County hopes to hire new financial chief this month
Posted on Wednesday, December 3, 2008
The person in charge of legal and ethical financial compliance and a multimillion-dollar budget for Washington County should be in place sometime this month.
There were nine applicants for county comptroller received by the closing of the application period at 4 p.m. Monday, County Administrator John Gibson said.
Officials are hoping to select a person for the job this month so County Comptroller Boyd Darling, who announced last month he is leaving to take an opportunity in the private sector, can work with the person to close out the budget this month.
Darling plans to stay in the position through February to help train the new comptroller.
The comptroller deals with purchases by the county, also called accounts payable. Darling said the comptroller also deals with taxing mechanisms and understanding them.
“I also deal with audit compliance and, with that, any legal compliance concerning if it’s legal to make this expenditure,” Darling said.
“I deal with the crunching of the numbers, but that is a small part of my job, and I deal more with politics, working with all of the departments, the elected officials and the employees of this county to make sure that we are compliant with legal and ethical standards in everything that we do,” he said.
Darling said that one of the things that he asks himself when he is unsure about an expenditure is if it is going to pass the “headline test.”
“What’s it going to look like as a headline in the newspaper?” he said.
Gibson said he has yet to look at the applications “real closely” but noted that the applicants are from the area.
He said County Judge-elect Marilyn Edwards will “want the opportunity to review those nine, see if there is anything she likes there.”
Edwards said she has looked at the applications and planned to conduct interviews with three people Monday.
She said there are some good applicants.
Gibson said the job qualifications for comptroller involve more than accounting.
“Everyone knows that two plus two is four in the accounting world.
“The thing that we have to look at is, is this somebody who understands how governmental accounting adds two plus two?”
He said a successful candidate should have experience in governmental accounting as opposed to just general accounting.
Filling this position, he said, is “very important because that’s a very difficult job, to sit down and anticipate revenues and keep budgets straight for an entire year. You have to deal with the Quorum Court, so there are a lot of issues.”
Edwards said “it’s a vitally important job.”
She said the comptroller has to be able to work with the media and the Quorum Court.
“They’ve got to have really good office skills and office manners,” she said.
She said the comptroller has to attend Quorum Court meetings and deal with different offices.
Darling, who has been with the county for 19 years, said the main function of the job is to maintain the finances for the county — that being budgets, expenditures and revenues.
“Of course the treasurer deals more with revenues than I do, but I still deal with them,” Darling said.
The general fund is the largest fund with 49 departments sharing a budget of about $20 million, which is the estimated number for next year’s budget that must be formally approved by the Quorum Court on Dec. 11.
The jail fund is the second-largest fund with a budget of about $12.5 million.
Road and bridge is the third-largest fund with a budget of about $8 million.
Darling worked in the private sector prior to taking the comptroller position and said becoming accustomed to differences between working in the private and public areas is an adjustment.
“Everything’s more public,” he said. “I try to be as open as I possibly can with the reporters, the extend that I don’t want any of them to consider the fact that I’m trying to hide anything because it doesn’t look good when your finance guy is trying to hide something,” he said.
He said he strives to be “very open, transparent.”
As for the Freedom of Information Act, he said, it took a while to become accustomed to it in the public sector.
“Coming from a private job, we were never allowed to discuss salaries, and then I come here, and my salary hits the front page of the newspaper,” he said.
“It took me a little while to get used to people coming in and requesting to see some of our expenditures and different things,” he said.
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