At last week’s board of supervisors meeting, Goochland County’s top administrators met in a closed meeting to discuss, according to their agenda, “specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice pertaining to the County’s recent financial audit.”

What specifically does that mean?

I don’t yet know, but I hope it means the supervisors are going to hold someone accountable for the 40 reporting errors that auditing firm KPMG has discovered in the county’s financial records.

Those mistakes occurred throughout the county, and are related to governmental activities, the school board, the economic development authority and the county’s utilities department and sanitary district.

And some of them involved millions of dollars.

Who was at fault?

KPMG says the main culprits are flawed reporting practices and a lack of checks and balances.

Clearly the county was hitting a few stones along its path to smooth fiscal management; one of those bumps may well have been the involvement of Robinson, Farmer, Cox Associates, a firm the county paid, at a cost of $755,064 over 11 years, to independently audit its finances.

But how independent could that firm be when it was preparing the county’s financial statements and providing rate studies for the public utilities department, fiscal impact analyses for bond issuances and other financial consulting services, including assessing potential economic development projects and intergovernmental negotiations?

It doesn’t take an in-depth reading of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to conclude that an auditing firm probably shouldn’t issue an opinion on its own reports, that maybe that would reveal a slight bias.

There are some in the county who say, hey, come on, now. Let’s put this behind us, the tracks ahead are cleared, so let’s move on!

But others want to know how we ever rattled so far off the rails, and who led us there.

Why should Goochland be content to just forgive and forget a debacle that has cost the county considerable time, money and resources to repair, and that could very well jeopardize our credit rating?

I keep hearing rhetoric as to how we just need good common sense in this county to move ahead.

Well, good common sense tells me that when a scoundrel jumps out and hijacks your train, you don’t just hand over your gold and blithely head back into the horizon; you track the crook, you capture him, and you hold him accountable for creating havoc.

I guess over the next few months we’ll see what kind of sense our supervisors have, and how they use it.