WHITEHALL — An outside audit of Trempealeau County’s purchasing-card program found 61 transactions without receipts over a six-month sample, most of them tracing to two departments, and described the county’s controls over the cards as “informal.” The finance committee takes up the report at its July 21 meeting at the courthouse.
The audit, performed by Coulee Region Municipal Advisors LLC of La Crosse, reviewed card activity from October 2025 through March. Of the 61 undocumented purchases, the bulk came from one department responsible for maintaining county buildings and grounds and another whose crews work in the field — offices where staff routinely buy parts, fuel and supplies at hardware stores and farm-supply counters, and where a paper receipt is easy to pocket and easier to lose.
The auditors found no evidence of theft or personal use. “This is a documentation problem, not a diversion problem,” the written report states. “The vendors, amounts and transaction descriptions are consistent with ordinary departmental operations.”
The report does not treat that as comfort. Without receipts, the auditors wrote, the county “cannot verify that purchases complied with budgets, that tax exemptions were applied, or that goods were in fact received.” The passage where the word “informal” appears describes a system that “relies on the diligence of individual cardholders rather than on documented, uniformly applied controls.”
Relies on the diligence of individual cardholders rather than on documented, uniformly applied controls.
Coulee Region Municipal Advisors, audit report
The sums involved are mostly small. The report puts the median undocumented purchase under $75; the largest was a single transaction of about $1,100 at an equipment dealer. The 61 items total roughly $9,400 — a rounding error in a county budget, but the auditors note that the figure is beside the point. A control that fails on a $40 purchase fails the same way on a $4,000 one.
Coulee Region recommends three fixes. First, a receipt-or-repay policy: a cardholder who cannot produce documentation within 30 days reimburses the county personally, a provision the report calls “standard in well-run municipal card programs.” Second, monthly reconciliation, with each department head signing off on every statement before it goes to the finance office — currently, the report found, statements are paid on arrival and matched to receipts “as time allows.” Third, a full card inventory. The auditors could not initially confirm how many cards were in circulation; the count settled at 34, including two issued to employees who had left county service. Both have since been canceled.
County finance staff have told the committee they expect to present a draft policy alongside the audit response. Whether the fixes stick is the part worth watching: the report notes the county adopted a card policy in 2014 that called for monthly reconciliation, and that the practice “does not appear to have survived subsequent staff turnover.”
The finance committee meets July 21 at 9 a.m. in Whitehall. The Pioneer will report on the committee’s response in the August issue.