Give the Walker County Board of Commissioners credit for this much: when two state representatives started talking about a forensic audit, the board didn’t hide. It called a public meeting, brought in an expert and let citizens ask questions.
That meeting happened Tuesday night on October 20th. What came out of it was more useful than anyone probably expected. Watch Here
State Representatives Mike Cameron and Steve Tarvin have proposed local legislation requiring Walker County to undergo a forensic review at the start of each new commissioner’s term. Chairwoman Angie Teems opened by calling it an “unfunded mandated requirement.” The board, she said, wanted to be “as prepared and educated as possible for the impact to the taxpayers.”
The board billed this special meeting as an information session. At times it sounded more like a board preparing its defense.
The board’s expert was David Sawyer, an Atlanta forensic accountant who has spent 26 years doing nothing else. Sawyer is a CPA, a Certified Fraud Examiner and a licensed private investigator. He has worked for Baldwin, DeKalb, Newton and Sumter counties, among others.
He gave the room a free education. Every taxpayer in Walker County should hear it.
What an audit is, and what it isn’t
Sawyer started with vocabulary. There is no such thing as a “forensic audit,” he said. “Audit” is a defined term. It means a financial statement engagement that offers an opinion on whether the county’s numbers are fairly presented under accounting standards.
That is a real and necessary job. It is also a narrow one.
Annual audits are not designed to catch fraud, Sawyer said. Fraud Schemes are built to stay under the materiality thresholds auditors use. He compared it to the ocean. A financial audit covers the whole surface but stays shallow. A forensic investigation picks one spot and drills to the bedrock.
I have been making that point for years. “We passed our audit” answers a different question than the one taxpayers are usually asking.
He also explained why Rushton LLC, the county’s longtime auditor, couldn’t do a forensic review even if asked. It would be auditing its own work.
None of that is an accusation. It is just how the tools work.
The chicken and the egg
Commissioners asked good questions, but they kept circling the same one: scope.
Doesn’t a forensic investigation need a reason? Somebody has to tell the investigator where to look. One commissioner asked what the board would need to see before saying, “we may look into that.” Another pointed out the county couldn’t even put out a request for proposals without a scope, because no firm could price the job. A third conceded it was hard for Sawyer to give answers “because we haven’t told you much.”
“The term I keep hearing is fraud,” one commissioner said. “That’s what we’re really talking about.”
Commissioner Brian Hart said he reviews the audits every year, asks the auditors to rank the county and hears that Walker is above average. He acknowledged that some money “gets just misplaced in different accounts,” but said he has seen nothing to suggest theft.
That is an honest answer. It also exposes the real problem.
Sawyer said investigations start from red flags: a change order that turns the low bidder into the high bidder, a line item that jumps with no explanation, a tip from an employee. Those tips rarely come from the top, he said. The people who control the purse strings are not the ones who blow the whistle.
The board wants to know where an investigator should start looking.
How could they know? How could anyone?
Walker County publishes budgets. It publishes the annual audit. It publishes summaries. Nobody outside the finance office sees the actual payments. Not the public, and not the district commissioners, who get totals instead of the transaction level data. Overseeing a $40 million government from summary totals is like diagnosing a busted engine by staring at the fuel gauge.
You cannot spot a padded change order in a budget. You cannot spot a vendor paid twice in a department spending pie chart. And you cannot spot a questionable pattern in data you are never allowed to see.
Right now, everyone is blind. The board is asking taxpayers to point at a problem in a room with the lights off.
Turn them on. Publish detailed, transaction-level spending data every month, and the scope question starts answering itself. A retired accountant notices a vendor nobody has heard of. A contractor sees a competitor’s change orders pile up. A reporter spots a payment pattern. Or a commissioner finds something on his own and asks a question at the next meeting. That is how oversight is supposed to work.
The vendor nobody has heard of
Sawyer described one of the most common schemes he sees. Someone inside a government sets up a shell company, a “front company” in his words, owned by themselves, a family member or a close associate. Then money flows to it through the government’s normal procurement process. Every payment looks routine. Every check has an invoice behind it.
Summary reports will never catch that. A searchable list of every payee might.
If you want to see how that kind of fraud plays out, watch “Bad Education,” the HBO film starring Hugh Jackman. It tells the true story of the Roslyn school district on Long Island, one of the most celebrated districts in the country, where more than $11 million was stolen in the early 2000s. The superintendent and his top business official ran the district’s money for years while everyone admired the results.
The first story about it didn’t come from a forensic accountant or a grand jury. It came from the high school newspaper, the Hilltop Beacon.
Give people the data, and someone will read it and use it.
A word about roles.
Consider how the commissioners talked about the county. “As we manage $40 million a year.” “Rank us on a 1 to 10.” “Our CFOs.” “Every dollar we spend.”
It may seem small. It isn’t.
Commissioners are not the county government. They are not part of the club. They are the people’s representatives, elected to oversee a limited government. Walker County moved to a five-member board in 2021 so district commissioners could be the check. An independent review or forensic examination is not something done to the board. It is something the board should do for the people who hired them.
The sticky note
When public comment opened, the room changed. Nobody came with pitchforks. They came with informed questions and measured scrutiny.
Marc Veazey of Chickamauga spoke first. He spent 35 years in law enforcement, 25 of them as an FBI special agent. He also happens to be a Certified Fraud Examiner. In January, he takes office as the District 2 commissioner.
He told the story of a multimillion-dollar health care fraud case in Louisiana he worked on. It didn’t start with an audit. It started when someone handed an auditor a yellow sticky note with ten words on it: “You need to take a look at the marketing department.”
Veazey was careful. He said he does not believe there is widespread fraud in Walker County and would never suggest wrongdoing without evidence. But a review, he said, should start with questions, not conclusions.
“The money we manage does not belong to the board of commissioners,” he said. “It belongs to the people of Walker County.” And: “Good government should never fear independent verification.”
That is a commissioner-elect setting the tone for the next board. It’s a good one.
Resident Melissa Hulsey pushed the conversation past theft entirely. Her concerns were waste, overlapping job duties, top-heavy management, policy compliance, internal controls and capital project management. Sawyer said all of it fits inside a forensic scope. Chairwoman Teems said she would personally welcome public input on what any review should cover. That is the right instinct.
The real cost question
Sawyer said his five-month review of SPLOST and TSPLOST spending in Baldwin County ran $80,000 to $90,000. He said the cost depends heavily on the condition of the records and how responsive people are.
That point is worth remembering. Last year, a request I made for the county’s standard ledger and financial data exports came back with a quote of $9,284.80. Records that hard to get make every future review more expensive.
Hart raised a fair worry. County budgets have climbed 6 to 7 percent a year. The board dipped into surplus last year, and he reminded everyone that even $100,000 “goes a long way in our budget.”
He’s right. Which is why the best idea in the room didn’t cost anything.
Sawyer said forensic accountants try to sell prevention up front, “but a lot of people aren’t really willing to put that money to it.” Governments pay more later, after the damage is done.
Then, describing how his own work starts, he walked through a simple trend analysis: watch the line items year to year and ask why they move. He called it “pretty basic stuff” and said it is a good way for taxpayers to check things themselves.
He is right. But taxpayers can only do it with data. And Sawyer said every investigation starts with exactly that: financial data first, then invoices, purchase orders, change orders and contracts. That is the list I have been asking the county to publish.
Publish the data!
There is a third option between “trust us, bro” and an expensive investigation: proactive, transaction-level spending disclosure. Call it the cheapest audit Walker County will ever get.
It isn’t a new idea here. In July 1949, Walker County Commissioner of Roads and Revenue Fay B. Murphey Sr. published every county transaction in the Walker County Messenger and swore before a notary it was a full and true statement. He listed $557.30 for courthouse coal, $13.52 for “Axes for Ditches” and $1 for post office box rent.
That was before computers. Today the county’s accounting software can export a monthly check register in minutes. Monroe County does it. Jasper County does it. So do Augusta, Fulton County and Chattanooga.
Here is what that looks like in Walker County:
Publish monthly spending data online. At the close of each month, post a searchable, downloadable check register for every fund, including the General Fund, SPLOST, TSPLOST and debt service. Every payee, date, amount, department and description, alongside contracts and change orders.
Give every commissioner the full ledger(at minimum). Each district commissioner should get the same transaction-level export every month, automatically. Commissioner-elect Veazey knows what to do with a general ledger. Give him one.
Make it a routine export, not a records request. Monthly publication removes that friction for everyone, staff included.
I have tried to show what’s possible with what the county already publishes. At Walker County Explorer, anyone can explore Walker County’s finances, budget, employee roster and census trends in one place. It is a start. Imagine it running on monthly transaction data.
Next job for Representatives Cameron and Tarvin. There is another bill to file.
Georgia should not fight this battle one county at a time. Cameron and Tarvin should file legislation creating a statewide Georgia Open Ledger: one standardized portal where every county, city and school system uploads machine-readable transaction data each month, with vendor names, contract links and department codes.
https://www.elliotpierce.net/i/162646800/a-real-solution-georgias-own-version-of-the-ledger-act
That bill would help Walker County without singling it out. It would help every small county that can’t afford a forensic accountant. It would turn every taxpayer, reporter and commissioner into an auditor. And if a forensic review is ever needed, the scope would already be obvious, and much of the evidence would already be public.
Sunlight is prevention. A contractor who knows every change order goes online next month thinks twice about padding one. A clerk who knows payments are searchable doesn’t pay the same invoice twice. Problems surface in 30 days, not five years.
Tuesday night, the board asked where an investigator should look. Nobody can answer that while blind. Publish the data so we can see.