CCPO learns valuable lessons

In a letter to the Community Crime Prevention Organisation’s (CCPO) new committee, auditors hired by the outgoing committee confirmed the organisation’s financial statements were in arrears.

In the letter sent on 13 September, the auditors reported they “were approached by C Rutherford in 2014 to urgently assist them with the preparation of the financial statements of the organisation. In view of the urgency of the matter, staff was assigned to carry out the audits for 2011 to 2015 in August 2014.

The financial statements were in arrears and the organisation needed financial statements to present.

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We advised the CCPO that the statutory records were not up to date and requested that these be updated as soon as possible. We also suggested that further expertise was required within the organisation to run the operation in accordance with good practice.”

“In 2014 it came to my attention that the financials were not up to date as they should be and were lagging further and further behind each year,” said outgoing CCPO chairman, Richard Allkins.

“We made a decision at a committee meeting that this needed to be addressed immediately and the following steps were taken to rectify this:

Firstly we upgraded our Pastel software programme to help speed up the reconciliation with banking, as a large portion could then be automated, and secondly we moved the auditor to a company that our treasurer used, as this would speed up communications.

We also employed a part-time assistant to assist with daily office work to free up our secretary to get the audit work completed.”

Allkins said the audit process was caught up by the last year’s AGM and during the year all concerned parties were given audited statements for the years as they were completed.

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“Towards the end of 2015, we also made the decision to upgrade one of our vehicles as it had done over 400,000km.

We invested in bullet-proof vests for our supervisors, as we felt it was irresponsible to send them to incidents where they were in danger without some form of protection.

Going into the AGM last year, we were aware that our savings were low and that we would need an increase in fees to sustain our current guarding levels. However, up to the hand-over to the new committee, all our suppliers had been paid as per normal.

What we did miss, however was that the workman’s compensation had not been paid. This was picked up by the new committee and a payment plan was worked out to get this up to date.

There were also a number of slip-ups in administration that occurred during the year, most likely because of the focus being on getting the audit up to date.

Most of these errors have been picked up by the current committee and are being addressed.

As far as the statutory records are concerned, it was found that a number of records and paperwork were not being recorded correctly, according to legislation, and the new committee has made a big effort to comply.

The one thing we have realised is that any future committee needs to have a qualified person on board who is up to date on current legislation or else we are going to be constantly addressing these issues.

The big challenge is to find someone with the right qualification who is prepared to give up their time to assist those who give up so much of their time trying to make this organisation operate while still managing their own businesses and careers,” said Allkins.

 
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