An audit of the Recreation and Park Commission for the Parish of East Baton Rouge (BREC) (BREC) found multiple major issues with how it handles money. The Louisiana Legislative Auditor published the report, which was done by a private firm.
The biggest issue found, according to Brooks Williams, BREC’s new superintendent since August, was how the agency kept track of its resources.
The audit found that the agency didn’t reconcile its books, meaning it didn't align what resources it actually had with the resources it budgeted to have — makingit harder to keep track of the pace of their spending. This was also flagged in a 2024 audit.
“ You can spend like a drunken sailor, but if you're doing bank reconciliations, you know that you're spending like a drunken sailor,” Williams said. “You can be very tight and know that you're very tight if you do reconciliations.”
To address this, Williams said BREC’s finance department is going through a checklist at the end of each month to ensure what’s in the books matches what the agency has on hand, tracking back to the beginning of the year.
BREC’s budget is about $110,000. The audit also flagged two instances of misappropriation from 2022, both driven by employee errors without enough oversight, totaling just over $7,000.
One incident involved an employee editing overtime, which lessened another employee’s pay by about $1,200.
The other incident involved $5,000 in rental facility cash, some of which Williams said was found in a drawer.
Williams said the commission has already rolled out changes to address the audit’s findings.
“We are going through a culture shift in the agency, and we are going through an operational shift in the agency, and that is certainly one of the issues that we have found,” he said. “We are not properly utilizing best practices or the systems that we do have in place or could have in place to ensure that those fail-safes are there.”
The commission is also transitioning to cashless payments later this year, which will eliminate misplaced cash.
Williams said the commission is voluntarily undergoing a forensic audit, which scrutinizes the budget significantly more than normal audits, to get the agency’s finances in shape.
