Mississippi’s newly appointed State Auditor Shad White said his office is currently in the process of conducting a self-audit and so far there have been no significant issues found.
White initially announced his office’s plans to initiate a compliance audit of their office in August and said they will have the final results of the audit on September 19th.
The audit is a two-step process and White says the first one has gone smoothly with auditors from outside of the state coming in to assess their practices.
“That involved lawyers from Louisiana, Virginia and several other states and they spent a week in our office and did an analysis on how we do audits,” White said. “The great thing is that it is evidence that previous Auditor Stacey Pickering had done a great job. We had no written findings which in accounting terms means a clean bill of health.”
The findings from the first phase of the audit will be made available online soon and the second phase is underway with an internal audit being completed by the agency.
“We have Mississippi state law experts in our office who do compliance audits and they are doing a compliance audit of us right now,” White said. “We will review what they have and fix any problems, then post the findings online and go from there.”
White said he believes this will give them the opportunity to have fresh eyes on the agency.
“It will give us the credibility to go to all of these other state agencies and say, look, we did this to ourselves, we are not putting you through anything that we wouldn’t ourselves go through.”
White added that this is the first time in 22 years anything like this has been done and that it is the first time ever that the Mississippi Office of the State Auditor had done a compliance audit of their own agency.
