Invercargill City Council will finally adopt its 2021-22 annual report after significant delays through the auditing process.
It has recorded a $6.6 million surplus for the financial year, the report states.
In December, councillors raised concerns about delays after Audit NZ director Dereck Ollsson wrote to the council saying it had decided to defer signing off the audit report until after the statutory December 31 deadline.
At the time, he said its ability to complete the audit had been significantly affected by the accumulation of several issues, including a high volume of errors in the consolidation process and misstatements it had identified during the audit process.
This work was completed only last week and the document will be adopted today, more than two months after the original deadline.
Council’s chief financial officer Patricia Christie prepared a report about the matter which will be presented to the council for approval and signing.
The opinion from Audit New Zealand would be in the form of a modification qualification in relation to the 2021 comparative numbers referring to the valuation of Property, Plant and Equipment, she said.
"Audit New Zealand’s opinion for 2021 was that council has understated the fair value of its assets and therefore understated the positive increase in the value of our performance.
"Officers did not agree with this assessment."
She also stated council had an operating surplus — before the revaluation of property, plant and equipment and investment property — of $6.6 million.
This was an increase of $2.2 million if compared to the previous year’s report which had a surplus of $4.4 million, Ms Christie said.
Council achieved 63% of its long-term plan levels of service for the year and Mrs Christie noticed the areas for improvement included Water, Roading Services and Solid Waste Management.
"Solid Waste did not meet its targets for four of five KPIs [key performance indicator].
"There are a number of areas of focus for the future including public education to reduce the amount of waste ending up in landfill.
"In the area of roading sadly it was a bad year for road traffic accidents — the missed KPIs relate to fatal and serious injury crashes."
Council would continue to work to improve those indicators, she said.
The report will be presented today.
