Overview
In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor has conducted a performance audit of certain activities of the Nantucket County Sheriff’s Department (NCSD) for the period July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2020.
We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.
Below is our audit objective, indicating the question we intended our audit to answer, the conclusion we reached regarding the objective, and where the objective is discussed in this report.
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Objective |
Conclusion |
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No; see Findings 1a, 1b, and 1c |
To achieve our objective, we gained an understanding of NCSD’s internal control environment related to the objective by reviewing applicable agency policies and procedures, reperformed NCSD’s procedures for the civil process to see how they compared to its written policies and procedures, and conducted inquiries with NCSD management.
In addition, we performed the following audit procedures to obtain sufficient audit evidence to address our objective.
Civil Processes
To conduct our testing of civil processes, we obtained a list of all civil processes in our audit period from NCSD. Using Audit Command Language (ACL) software, we selected a nonstatistical, random sample of 60 of 924 civil processes. For each civil process selected, we reviewed the hardcopy civil process jackets to determine whether civil process jackets were filled out and papers were served. We also reviewed these jackets as well as NCSD’s bank statements to determine whether fees were collected by staff members and deposited in NCSD’s bank account. We used a nonstatistical sampling method when conducting our testing of civil processes, and we could not project the results of our testing to the rest of the population.
Data Reliability
We obtained from NCSD the civil process spreadsheet, which lists all civil processes NCSD performed for the audit period. To determine the integrity of the data on the spreadsheet, we interviewed management personnel who were responsible for the data and inspected the spreadsheet to identify any missing data. To confirm the completeness and accuracy of the spreadsheet, we used ACL to select a random sample of 20 civil processes from the spreadsheet and traced them to the hardcopy civil process jackets. In addition, we selected 20 random hardcopy civil process jackets to trace back to the spreadsheet. We identified issues during these procedures, which are detailed in Finding 1b. Although we identified these issues with the spreadsheet, it was the only list we had to conduct our sampling for testing and conclude on our objective. Therefore, we have determined that the information NCSD provided to us was sufficiently reliable for our audit purposes.
| Date published: | December 9, 2021 |
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