City Commissioners approved a new audit contract during their Feb. 4 meeting.

The three-year contract with Eide Bailly is $115,400 for the current fiscal year; $119,700 for next fiscal year; and $124,250 for the third fiscal year.

The city’s fiscal years run from July 1 to June 30.

State law requires municipalities to perform audits annually.

The city requested proposals for audit services for the next three fiscal years and received two responses, from Eide Bailly and Wipfli.

City to consider new audit contract [2022]

The city’s audit selection committee met on Jan. 8 to review the bids.

City finance staff said during the Feb. 4 commission meeting that fewer firms are conducting municipal audits to their complexities and regulations.

Two of the major requirements were used in reviewing the bids:

• the firm’s past experience and performance on comparable government engagements
• the quality of the firm’s professional personnels experience to be assigned to the engagement and the quality of the firm’s management support personnel’s experience to be available for technical consultation

Those two requirements made up 70 percent of the selection process and the remaining 30 percent was attributed to cost, according to city staff.

Audit contract on city agenda this week [2019]

The committee recommended Eide Bailly because the firm had “substantially more municipal auditing experience than Wipfli based on the references provided” and its proposal was 4.24 percent less than Wipfli’s, according to city staff.

The total cost of the three year contract to Eide Bailly is $359,350, including travel costs.

The total Wipfli proposal was $374,596, not including travel costs, according to the city.

The audit contract is between the city, Eide Bailly and the state.

The city previously contracted with Anderson ZurMuehlen for three years of auditing for $159,00.

AZ had provided the city’s audit services since 2016, but no longer audits municipal governments.

The new contract with Eide Bailly is a $200,350, or 126 percent increased over the last AZ contract, according to city staff, but is comparable to current audit service contracts in other large Montana cities.

The city’s audit committee has six members: the mayor, a commissioner, city manager, finance director and two private citizens.

City Commissioners established the audit committee in 1992 and updated it in 2016 to add a second citizen to the membership. Citizens are appointed for three-year terms.

The private citizens currently serving on the committee are Jeff Heimel and Christine Jewett.