Chelsea’s outside auditors gave the city a clean opinion on its FY2025 books, and the City Manager asked the council to hold a subcommittee meeting with the auditors anyway. Both facts are in a June letter to the council, and the second one is the more interesting.
The opinion
Roselli, Clark and Associates, the city’s auditing firm, issued what accountants call an unmodified opinion on the FY2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report: the financial statements “present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the City in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.” That is the best result an audit produces. It means the numbers are right. It does not mean the auditors had nothing to say.
The request
Fidel Maltez’s letter transmitting the report asks the council to “schedule a subcommittee on conference to review the FY25 ACFR and Independent Audit,” and says the administration will invite the auditors “to answer any questions regarding the audit findings, financial statements, internal controls, or the City’s overall financial condition.” The phrase that matters is internal controls. Every municipal audit comes with a management letter, a separate document that lists the weaknesses the auditors found in how money is handled even when the statements are accurate: reconciliations done late, receipts not deposited on time, a department that keeps its own ledger, a payment approved by one person when it should be two. The management letter is where the decade of unpaid Eversource bills, the prior-year invoices that keep surfacing, and the free cash ledger that was posted rotated and unreadable would show up.
The management letter is a public record. It was not in the June packet, and the subcommittee meeting has not been scheduled.
Why ask
A City Manager who volunteers a sit-down with the auditors in a year when the council has been fighting him over records and legal opinions is either confident or preempting. Either way the council should take him up on it, in public, with the management letter on the table. The FY25 books were the last year of the $32 million free cash balance; the FY26 audit, due next spring, will be the first year of the $5 million one, and the controls that mattered less when the cushion was deep will matter more. We have requested the FY25 management letter from the Auditor’s office.