Winnebago County leaders are working to make taxpayers whole after they say two county officials made unauthorized changes to this year's budget submission that resulted in hundreds of thousands of extra dollars being collected from taxpayers.
County Executive Gordon Hintz said the mistake came from two officials who made changes to the budget without authorization. He said those two officials have since resigned.
"You can't have staff making decision on their own that increases taxes for taxpayers that were never approved and never authorized by the board and by myself and those people no longer work here," Hintz said.
Two discrepancies were identified. An extra levy cost taxpayers about 69 cents for every $100,000 of property value. A second issue — a change in how budget amendments were funded — is estimated to have cost more.
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Hintz said when he discovered the mistake, he started an internal investigation, which led to the resignations.
Tuesday night the county board passed a resolution to retroactively approve the budget changes, with Hintz saying he wants to move forward with "stronger controls."
"The county board and I made our decisions," Hintz said at Tuesday's meeting. "Those decisions should have been carried out exactly as we made them. They were not."
Former county finance director Paul Kaiser, one of the two officials who resigned, spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting. During a prepared statement that lasted about two minutes, he said he and his team were acting as normal, adding that the county does not have a "centralized finance focus."
"Each department has finance staff that report to the department head and not the finance department," Kaiser said. "Each department does their own thing with Corporate Finance (7 people - now 6) trying to oversee all activities of 27 departments and over 30 funds, plus managing a $150MM dollar investment portfolio, but with no authority to initiate change or improvement in processes as each department has their own finance staff that does not report to the finance department."
Kaiser called on the board to reconsider the resolution to "inquire more into the circumstances," before the resolution ultimately passed later in the meeting.
Hintz said while the actions did not violate state law, they did expose weaknesses in the county's process.
"No one personally benefited from the decisions that were being made, I don't know if it was negligence or a failure to understand finance or Wisconsin law," Hintz said.
Oshkosh taxpayer Kristina Taylor said she had mixed feelings about the situation.
"It does seem like a small mistake, but I guess I'm glad the people who messed up is being held accountable," Taylor said.
As the county works through the coming budget cycle, officials say they will find ways to make taxpayers whole.
Hintz said new safeguards are being put in place to prevent similar mistakes.
"I can tell you going forward... we're going to make sure we hire people with a background in finance at the local level that follow the law," he said. "We're also going to have a process that doesn't leave these decisions in two people's hands."
