MARSHALL - The Madison County Board of Commissioners received encouraging news in its Fiscal Year 2024-25 audit report, as the county's unassigned fund balance percentage continues to grow.
James Bence, a CPA and partner with Mauldin and Jenkins, a Greenville, South Carolina-based public accounting firm operating in eight states, provided the county's audit report to the Madison County Board of Commissioners in its Oct. 13 meeting.
According to Bence, the team conducted a single audit on the county's allocations from federal programs, as beginning in 2025, any federal reward of more than $750,000 is required to have a single audit. The three federal programs audited were the county's Medicaid, FEMA grants and the Community-Oriented Policing Services
(COPS) grants. The Mauldin and Jenkins team also audited the new State Cashflow Loan program.
The team did not identify any material noncompliance with the four programs, Bence said.
According to accounting firm James Moore and Co., a regular audit examines an organization’s financial statements to verify if they are accurate and follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), whereas a single audit combines a regular financial statement audit with a specialized compliance audit to test how federal grant money is spent.
General Fund balance
"When most people look at a government from one entity to another to try to determine where they stand among their peers, the General Fund fund balance is typically the first place where people look," Bence said.
In his report, Bence said as of June 2025, roughly 80% of Madison's fund balance was unassigned. According to the state Local Government Commission, among North Carolina's county governments with General Fund expenditures lower than $100 million, the average unassigned fund balance was roughly 52%.
"You all are sitting in the higher path of your peer group for counties of your size," Bence said.
The county's unassigned fund balance percentage has grown each year since 2021, according to figures read by Commissioner Chair Michael Garrison.
Garrison said the county's unassigned fund balance percentages for the previous five years are:
- 2020-21: 9%
- 2021-22: 27%
- 2022-23: 46%
- 2023-24: 65%
Bence said that climb from 9% in 2020-21 to 80% in 2024-25 was "impressive."
The county also transferred more than $6 million to its General Fund budget.
Expenditures
The county's final approved budget for Fiscal Year 2024-25, ending June 30, 2025, saw expenditures of roughly $43 million.
"The actual expenditures for the year ended up being about $34.5 million," Bence said. "As had been the case the past several years, a lot of that excess is due to our DSS being approximately 70% of the budget, based on the fact that some of the planned programs weren't utilized by the community. So, we didn't have the offsetting revenue to cover those costs. A lot of that under-expended dollars there represents both the DSS department being underextended, and a few projects that didn't happen in the timeline that the budget was set forth."
According to Bence, there were departments that had current year expenditures in excess of the allocations set by the board, including the Public Safety department within the General Fund, which over-expended its budget by roughly $128,000.
Those overexpenditures will need to be reported under the Local Government Commission guidance.
"We just need to make sure that as we go through the course of the year that we're looking at doing budget amendments to get those approvals in place before the expenditures are done," Bence said.
In his closing remarks in the report, Bence encouraged the board to move back to a stricter adherence to the recommended guidelines of submitting audit reports to the state by the end of the calendar year.
County Manager Rod Honeycutt said he was encouraged by the audit report.
“It shows we’re fiscally responsible — fiscally strong, with a healthy fund balance that leaves us with a lot of options," Honeycutt told The News-Record Oct. 14.
Johnny Casey is the Madison County communities reporter for The Citizen Times and The News-Record & Sentinel. He can be reached at 828-210-6074 or jcasey@citizentimes.com.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Audit reveals 'healthy' unassigned fund balance percentage for Madison Co.
