[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Permanent Value of Audit Reports



At the Minnesota State Archives, we inherited an extensive set of audit
reports of state and local agencies, done by the Public Examiner's Office
through 1970.  As well as including the evaluative commentary, and sometimes
historical data, noted by other commentators on this list, the earlier ones
in particular (consistently through the 1940s and often later) tend to
contain extensive breakdowns of receipts and expenditures by source or
program.  As a body, they offer a good overview of the various governments'
fiscal affairs, and are usually much more complete and consistent than the
annual budgets and financial reports that we may or may not (before the
1960s mostly not) receive from the individual agencies.  We have used their
presence as a rationale for appraising or re-appraising all manner of more
detailed transactional financial records, retaining only those detailed
records that in one way or another seem to offer meaningful programmatic
data.

Even for more recent years, when annual budgets and year-end financial
reports are more consistently produced and retained, the audit reports may
offer a different perspective on an entity's fiscal affairs, and their
availability from a single source (the Public Examiner's successor agencies)
maximizes the coverage while minimizing the amount of effort on our part
needed to obtain said coverage.

Our experience certainly bears out the comments that others have made:  that
the documentary value of the audit reports (as well as of other summary
financial data) needs to be assessed -- in terms of their own content, with
relation to other available documentation, and with relation to the sorts of
info. that one wants to capture for permanent retention -- but that they are
of sufficient potential value to warrant making this assessment, rather than
automatically rejecting them (or automatically taking them, for that
matter).


Lydia Lucas
Archival Processing Coordinator
Minnesota Historical Society
245 Kellogg Boulevard West
St. Paul, MN  55102-1906
ph (651) 297-5542
fax (651) 296-9961
e-mail:  lydia.lucas@mnhs.org

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>