Alamance Community College trustees voted unanimously during their latest meeting to hire a new external auditing firm, replacing their longtime financial auditor, S. Preston Douglas & Associates.
Preston Douglas & Associates was initially hired on a two-year term to perform ACC’s biennial financial audits in 2012. ACC’s trustees had renewed the Lumberton-based firm’s contract five times since.
“[They] decided to move to the beach and become beach bums,” budget and finance committee chairman Pete Glidewell told his fellow trustees last week, apparently referring to retirements of two of the firm’s senior partners.
Yet Glidewell noted that the existing firm had responded to a Request for Proposals (RFP) that ACC issued earlier this year, through the state Department of Administration, but had failed to supply all the requisite information.
The community college most recently solicited bids for external auditing services in 2024. The contract was again awarded to the Lumberton firm in order to give the newly-hired chief financial officer Elizabeth (“Libba”) Thomas time to solicit, review, and recommend an independent auditor for the current fiscal year that ends on June 30, based on a report from the trustees’ budget and finance committee.
ACC issued an RFP earlier this year through the N.C. Electronic Vendor Portal and received three proposals, based on information provided for last week’s discussion.
The bids were: $30,000 from Forvis Mazars LLP of Springfield, Missouri, which has an office in Greensboro; $36,024 from Raleigh-based Sharpe Patel PLLC; and $41,500 from Clifton Larson Allen LLP, which is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota and has four North Carolina offices.
The trustees’ budget and finance committee ultimately recommended awarding the contract to CLA due to the firm’s familiarity with government accounting standards and experience with auditing higher education institutions.
During a discussion last week, Glidewell conceded that, while Clifton Larson Allen (CLA) had submitted the highest bid, he said that the budget and finance committee had recommended hiring CLA because of its “technical approach.”
State law (and the State Board of Community Colleges Code) typically requires competitively-bid contracts for services such as the external audit to be awarded to “the lowest responsive, responsible bidder.”
However, local units of state government (including community colleges) must also consider whether a bid meets all applicable legal requirements, along with whether the bidder has the skill, judgment, financial resources, and ability to perform the work within the stated specifications, according to the School of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill.
ACC officials subsequently acknowledged to The Alamance News last week that CLA was not the lowest bidder but was the most responsible bidder. “[The state Department of Administration] approved the choice for both cost and responsiveness,” ACC officials told the newspaper after the trustees’ latest monthly meeting.
Though the Raleigh-based firm, Sharpe Patel, had previously performed 10 community college audits and had three references from N.C. Community Colleges, it also previously had a “reported interaction” – i.e., an inquiry or a disciplinary matter – with the N.C. State Board of CPA Examiners and pertaining to one of its auditors.
ACC’s trustees voted 11-0 to award the contract to CLA. Trustee Dr. Roslyn Crisp was absent.
