AG 2005 01 10 - Laserfiche WebLink

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January 10,2005 To: Board of Commissioners From: Pamela S. Dubois, Deputy County Manager Subject: Request for Accountant Position in Finance As you may be aware, our Budget Officer, Cathie Straub, retired on December 31, 2004. She has many duties aside from those related to budgeting such as payroll supervision and deduction reconciliation's, employee health insurance changes and billing, workers compensation claims, and several other tasks as well as representing the County on the Board for JCPC grants. In light of her retirement, several changes are being implemented. All job duties aside from budgeting have been removed from the position. With the growth of the County and the need for more extensive analysis relating to County spending trends and measurements, it has become necessary for the County to have a full time employee dedicated to the budgeting function for the county. With this change, her other duties have to be reassigned to other staff members. All employee health insurance changes and billings have been assigned to the Human Resource Department. Workers compensation claims have been assigned to oneofFinance's Accounting Technicians. The major job duty remaining is the payroll supervision and deduction reconciliation function. This duty occurs every two weeks. It takes approximately 20% of her work time. This task has been reassigned to the Accounting Operations Supervisor. She will now be responsible for all the day-to-dayoperations of the Finance Department. With this change, she will be giving up several tasks in order to accomplish her new duties. Also with my assignment of duties as Deputy County Manager, I am spending more time out of the office attending meetings and working with other departments. The County is constantly changing and more demands for timely information is needed to meet those demands. It has been customary for the Finance Department to put off several evaluations and analysis until the annual audit is completed. This usually occurs at the end of October each year. Staff spends November through January getting caught up on these evaluations and analysis. This places Finance in a tough position when this information is needed for the budget process and other departments. It is my recommendation to establish an additional position in Finance, Accountant, so that employee workloads can be balanced,. payroll. supervised, and new operations and functions can be adequately covered. I would also like to poiI).t out that prior to Blair Bennett's retirement; Finance had an Accountant positioI). (additional staff position). When Blair retired, upon recommendation of the previous County Manager, his position as Deputy County Manager was reclassified as Finance Director and the Accountant position was eliminated. Since then, I have taken over the position of Deputy County Manager along with my duties as Finance Director. With the growth in the County C)