The Village of Telkwa passed their 2019 financial audit with no major concerns.
At the June 9 regular council meeting, representatives from Edmision Mehr Chartered Professional Accountants made a presentation.
Senior Accountant Al McCreary said that Telkwa is sitting in a very solid financial position and mentioned the multi-million dollar Trobak Water Tower project is almost complete.
The project is down to the last claim or two he said, there is just finishing up the site work and the fencing but because of winter conditions crews just started back up on May 1.
“It is in progress,” he told The Interior News. “The funding for it was 3.8 million dollars and because of the holdbacks, their payables are sitting at about $800,000 and the receivables are at about 600[,000]. Until they release the holdback, the government doesn’t pay them the money. Just because it is a large number, I brought it up. It is a major project for the village, because the numbers are large … if next year they don’t spend 3.6 million then all the numbers in the statements drop sustainably. But this year the numbers went up and the answer is Trobak.”
He added this one project is about a quarter of the assets of the village.
“That is pretty substantial,” he added. “If there weren’t systems in place to finance that, it is very major and affects small municipalities.”
But he said while Telkwa is a small municipality, it is well run.
“There are really no big issues. Just when you have a big project like this, it distorts the numbers substantially for one year.”
Deputy Annette Morgan asked at the end of his presentation if there were any unresolved questions from the prior years’ audit.
“A couple of issues left from 2016/2017 GST returns but we will sort that out soon,” explained McCreary. “We wrote off a grant that had been recorded incorrectly in 2016 and that has been dealt with and recorded and we made an adjustment on another grant of 14,000. So all items are pretty much cleaned up and up-to-date now.”