Columbia nabs financial award for 6th straight year
Not all that many years ago, it would have seemed far-fetched for the city of Columbia’s government to be acknowledged for its financial accounting.
Now it has seemingly become the norm.
The city announced Friday that it has received the Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting for the sixth consecutive year. That honor comes from the Government Finance Officers Association of the U.S. and Canada.
The city’s six-year streak of getting the fiscal acknowledgment came after an eight-year drought in which it had not received the nod from the finance officers association.
The GFOA represents public finance officials throughout North America, and most of its more than 20,000 members are federal, state and local finance officers. The Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting acknowledges a body that went beyond the minimum requirements in accounting, while exercising transparency.
City Chief Financial Officer Jeff Palen was pleased by the recent acknowledgment from the GFOA.
“The city’s annual (comprehensive fiscal) report was judged by a panel, it met the high standards of their program,” Palen said during a Friday news conference. “It meant demonstrating that we had a constructive spirit of full disclosure, to clearly communicate our financial story, and to motivate users to read the report.”
In a Friday afternoon statement, Columbia City Manager Teresa Wilson noted that when she was first appointed manager in 2013, one for her first orders of business was to begin overhauling the city’s finance department and start to “build a better financial foundation.”
“Receiving this award for six years in a row reassures me that we are continuing to take these fiduciary responsibilities seriously and we are doing the work necessary to achieve excellence,” Wilson said in the statement.
Third-term Mayor Steve Benjamin touted that Columbia has enjoyed budget surpluses in eight of the last 11 years.
“The GFOA award is the gold standard for recording financial stewardship,” Benjamin said, adding that public funds in 2020 have been “challenged in incredibly significant ways as we’ve dealt with the greatest pandemic since 1918, the greatest social unrest since 1968 and the biggest economic disruption probably since the Great Depression.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to wallop the city’s coffers this year. Officials have projected that the city’s revenues for the current budget year could be more than $20 million less than the last full budget year because of the effects of the global pandemic.
