MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The West Virginia State Auditor’s Office sees a perfect match between WVU and small, local governments in West Virginia.
In a partnership that was arranged with the help of State Auditor J.B. McCuskey, the Auditor’s Office will work with graduate students from the College of Business and Economics in the Small Government Monitoring Project. The program is intended to help local governments through audits that normally would be considered costly.
Dr. Scott Fleming, Associate Professor of Accounting at WVU, explained how it was a perfect match.
“I had this educational need, he (McCuskey) had an operational need, and together these two needs you know, provided a mutual solution,” said Fleming, who’s also in charge of WVU’s Executive Education Program.
For the College of B&E, the desire to give students real life data to work with and the need for better auditing technology worked perfectly with the Auditor’s Office need for non-costly solutions to perform audits. Fleming briefly explained the process to the AJR News Network’s Gary Bowden Show.
“We can have them actually go through, look at the data, do some risk assessment, do some planning, do some light testing of these things, then they could provide us with their findings,” he said.
36 students are currently a part of the program and according to Fleming, each student was vetted before looking at any local government data. Primarily to avoid any geographical bias that could be in play.
The program is considered beneficial for small towns who haven’t had a proper audit.
“An audit in a municipality helps gives assurances to those who live there, that to the best of our knowledge, it looks like things are on the up and up,” Fleming said.
Not only is there certain benefits from the audit, the cost benefits for the small towns are also there — with WVU working with the Auditor’s Office free of charge.
“The reality is they (small towns) simply can’t afford to pay several thousands of dollars to have the folks come in,” Fleming said. “So this is a way for the students to offset some of the costs.”
WAJR’s Dave Wilson will speak with students involved with the project on Morgantown AM later this week.