So how external was that audit, anyway?

On the wall of its administrative offices and in the preface to its annual reports, Goochland County has for years displayed certificates of achievement for “excellence in financial reporting.”

These recognitions were presented by the Government Finance Officers Association, or GFOA, as recently as fiscal years 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

For fiscal year 2007, GFOA awarded the certificate to Goochland as well as to more than 30 other counties across Virginia.

On its Web site, GFOA says that the award was created in 1945 to encourage local governments “to go beyond the minimum requirements of generally accepted accounting principles.”

GFOA adds that the awards will encourage these governments to “prepare comprehensive annual financial reports that evidence the spirit of transparency.”

That transparency has finally been achieved in Goochland, but not by its own efforts, and not by Robinson, Farmer, Cox Associates, the auditing firm the county employed for more than ten years.

Robinson, Farmer, Cox Associates also has a Web site, where it says that it “has earned the reputation as Virginia’s leading public accounting firm.”

The site says that the firm is currently engaged by 75 percent of Virginia’s 95 counties.

I have not read an audit of Robinson, Farmer, Cox Associates’ work in other counties. But in Goochland County, the firm’s leadership certainly seemed to be heading in the wrong direction.

KPMG, an auditing firm hired by the county last May to perform a countywide review of how Goochland handled its resources in 2009, has discovered 40 reporting errors in the county’s financial records.

Jean S. Bryant, Commissioner of the Revenue, says that KPMG has visited her office several times to ask questions and review documents.

The former auditor, she adds, would come in infrequently, and never even looked at certain records.

People in the county have asked, Why did our board of supervisors hire this firm? And beyond that, why did we keep hiring them?

But I am also wondering: Why didn’t Robinson, Farmer Cox Associates notice, just to name one of the 40 mistakes discovered by KPMG, that $4.1 million worth of capital debt was never recorded?

And when Goochland won one of its “excellence in financial reporting” awards in 2006, why didn’t one of Virginia’s 21 reviewers find that that capital debt, which was issued in 2003, was missing?

Well, that panel of reviewers included two representatives from Robinson, Farmer, Cox Associates.  So our citizens, and our board of supervisors, might want to add that to its list of unanswered questions for our former auditor, “Virginia’s leading public accounting firm.”