MOUNT VERNON, Ill. — The Mount Vernon Township High School finance committee and school board will meet Monday, June 24. The finance committee will meet at 5:30 p.m. and the board will meet at 6 p.m.

The finance committee meeting agenda is as follows:

Mt. Vernon Township High School

FINANCE COMMITTEE MEETING

Monday, June 24, 2024

5:30 p.m.

1. Bill Summary Review
2. Treasurer’s/Financial Reports
3. Other

The agenda for the board meeting is attached:

The FBI is investigating the financial dealings of Vance County’s former finance director. County manager Renee Perry confirmed the investigation to WRAL.

Katherine Bigelow was terminated in February after Perry said she misrepresented her qualifications as a CPA, or certified public accountant.

A financial audit found that Bigelow wired more than one million dollars of county funds to a company that she was affiliated with.

“The County also failed to comply with G.S. 159-28(b), which requires at least two signatures on all checks or drafts issued by a government, one being the Finance Officer or properly designated Deputy Finance Officer, and the other by another official of the local government designated for that responsibility by the governing board,” the audit reads.

The report also details several other issues, including overspending, insufficient training and lack of oversight.

“This action was able to go undetected for the time that it did due to a lack of understanding by the staff of the County in their assigned duties, and no cross-training of individuals who would have been able to provide oversight on the transactions,” according to the audit.

The audit findings were presented to the Board of Commissioners June 3 by Thompson Price Scott Adams and company.

“We finally started digging into why we weren’t getting the numbers we wanted…and the timeliness of the numbers…and the accuracy of the numbers. We began to dig into why weren’t the numbers reconciled, why weren’t they timely…which led to our discovery,” the auditor said during the meeting. “Our folks started going, ‘The answers she’s giving us are not what somebody in her position should be giving us.’”

In February, WRAL asked Perry if there have been any inconsistencies with the county’s budget, given Bigelow’s removal. Perry said there were no inconsistencies with the budget at the time.

During the June 3 meeting, the auditor said he brought those concerns to the previous county manager. Perry and other commissioners pressed him during the meeting, saying he should have relayed those concerns to her when she assumed her position in November 2023.

“We should have contacted Ms. Renee; I’m not disputing that,” the auditor said. “When she came on board, by the end of November, we should have said we need to have a conversation… Maybe I was just totally focused on getting data and not contacting management, which I will assume that responsibility.”

Another commissioner questioned the auditor about their responsibility to identify the financial issues sooner.

“Y’all been doing this since 2019, and y’all are just finding this now for 2023. Do y’all hold yourself any account for what’s going on?” they asked.

“Internally, we have done some looking. We think we did everything correctly. It’s unfortunate, but the reality is, a financial audit is not traditionally designed to pick up fraud,” the auditor said.

WRAL asked how the county is making changes to prevent a similar occurrence.

“To prevent in the future, we have internal controls in place that allow for dual signature on wire transactions. We are also working on an overhaul of our financial policies and procedures,” Perry responded via email.

The county has 60 days to provide a plan to fix the issues presented in the audit.

Bigelow previously served as the finance director since 2019. Perry also said Bigelow has died. The cause of death is unclear.

The central banks of seven Pacific island nations have signed a roadmap that commits them to working together to boost inclusive green finance (IGF) in a region highly vulnerable to climate change.

The Natadola roadmap, named after the beach resort where it was signed, was agreed by the central banks of hosts Fiji as well as Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Seychelles, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The document identifies regional capacity building in green finance as a priority and encourages the pooling of funding and technical expertise between countries, as well as the leveraging of technological solutions by the financial sector.

It also emphasises the need for a just transition to net zero that recognises different states’ capacity to implement policy solutions, as well as the existence of diverse needs within populations and between countries.

“These Pacific Island nations are leading the way in implementing groundbreaking IGF policies. Countries such as Fiji and Vanuatu have included disaster resilience into their regulatory frameworks,” the roadmap says.

“The Reserve Bank of Fiji has made significant strides by including green elements into surveys that assess the demand for financial services. This enabled them to comprehend the susceptibility of households and their strategies for dealing with natural catastrophes.”

The roadmap further highlights the Central Bank of Papua New Guinea’s “groundbreaking Inclusive Green Finance Policy, the first in the region, [which] includes a green taxonomy that resonates an inclusive approach to green financing wherein micro, small, and medium enterprises… are considered”.

The roadmap was signed under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Regional Initiative (PIRI) Plus, which is part of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), at the end of a four-day conference in Natadola that also included representatives of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the central banks of the Maldives and Bahamas.

The document is intended as an attempt to build on the 2017 Sharm El Sheikh Accord on green finance, which promotes a financially inclusive response to climate change in developing countries.

PIRI chair Ariff Ali, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Fiji, “emphasised that central banks play a critical role in addressing climate risk challenges, an issue acknowledged as one of the most pressing at our Pacific doorstep”, according to a statement released by the central bank.

“He underscored that central banks’ traditional mandates of price stability and financial stability are intrinsically tied to the health of our planet and that by integrating environmental considerations into macroeconomic frameworks, central banks can incentivise investments in renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and climate-resilient technologies.”

The AFI’s policy programmes director Eliki Boletawa meanwhile pointed to the devastating recent landslide in Papua New Guinea, which the prime minister has linked to changing weather patterns, as a sign of the urgency with which the region needs to “enhance our resilience against environmental shocks and emergencies”.

Low-lying Pacific island countries are considered extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels, with most of their populations living close to the shore.

The islands contribute less than 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but with cyclones and other extreme weather events rising in frequency and intensity, the cost of such disasters and local climate adaptation efforts has ballooned.

The Agence Française de Développement aid agency estimates that the annual cost of climate damage in the Pacific island nations stands at around 10% of their GDP, or US$1bn per year.