Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and Auditor Dennis Gallagher have hammered out a compromise plan to streamline the city’s century-old financial structure. The Denver City Council should approve the plan tonight and place it on the city’s Nov. 7 ballot.
The mayor and auditor had dueled for months over the overhaul, with Hickenlooper supporting the logical plan proposed by a special blue-ribbon panel that reviewed the city’s archaic financial practices. The compromise announced Thursday will remove accounting and payroll functions from the auditor’s office and place them under a new chief financial officer, as the reform panel urged. The auditor’s office will retain the right to conduct performance audits on agencies and to hold up contracts when warranted.
Hickenlooper appointed the special Financial Management Task Force after the city’s external auditor, KPMG LLP, flagged problems with the city’s long-standing procedure of dispersing financial responsibilities among five different city agencies. KPMG suggested centralizing such duties under a single chief financial officer under the mayor. Gallagher at first opposed removing the payroll and accounting functions his office now handles for a host of city agencies.
Last week, a City Council committee delayed voting on the reform plan to give Gallagher and Hickenlooper more time to work out their differences. After winning some points to ensure the continued independence of his office’s key auditing functions, Gallagher agreed to join Hickenlooper in supporting the revised reform proposal.
We believe Gallagher made a wise decision by signing on to the reform proposal. Freeing Gallagher’s office from routine bookkeeping chores will allow it to focus more resources on the key performance audits that will now be the auditor’s main task. Such reviews go beyond merely looking for obvious waste or fraud to see if better practices can give taxpayers improved service for less money.
Gallagher served on the Colorado legislature’s audit committee before moving to city government and has long experience with performance audits. The reform plan will thus allow him to bring his expertise more fully to bear in improving the efficiency of city government.
