A Florida Town's Payroll Fund Owes $6.9M It Never Recorded
Summary
The Town of Century, Florida's independent auditor could not render an opinion on its fiscal 2024 financial statements at all, citing internal-control failures the Town has left unfixed for years. Underneath that disclaimer, the Town's own numbers show its unrestricted net position deficit growing by $7.3 million in a single year -- driven in large part by a Payroll Fund that owes three other Town funds $6.9 million, debt the audit says was never recorded as a receivable on the Town's books.
A disclaimer, not just a deficit
A disclaimer of opinion is the auditor's strongest statement short of resignation: it says the firm could not gather enough reliable evidence to vouch for the financial statements as a whole, for any reason. HCT's report to the Town's Mayor and Council traces the disclaimer to the design and operation of the Town's internal controls over cash, receivables, purchases, payables, and interfund balances -- the basic bookkeeping infrastructure a set of financial statements rests on. The audit report itself, covering the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024, is dated March 13, 2026 -- and the Town separately missed Florida's statutory filing deadline for that year's audit, a finding the Town's own prior-year audit had already flagged as unresolved.
View data as table
| FY2023 | 1,878,697 | $1.9 million deficit, total primary government |
|---|---|---|
| FY2024 | 9,187,206 | $9.2 million deficit, total primary government |
Where the swing came from: an unbooked $6.9 million
The Town uses a separate internal fund to process payroll. By fiscal 2024, that Payroll Fund had run up an accumulated deficit of $7.2 million -- and it had covered its shortfalls by drawing on cash that legally belongs to three other Town funds. As of September 30, 2024, the Payroll Fund owed $1.6 million to the Natural Gas Fund, $2.1 million to the General Fund, and $3.3 million to the Water and Sewer Fund -- $6.9 million in total. None of it was recorded as a receivable in the Town's balance sheet or Statement of Net Position, the audit states, meaning the Town's own books did not reflect money it was owed internally. For comparison, the Town's entire governmental-activities revenue for the year -- taxes, state revenue sharing, grants, and fees combined -- was $2,532,575. The Payroll Fund's unbooked debt alone runs to roughly 2.8 times that.
View data as table
| Natural Gas Fund | 1,600,000 | owed by the Payroll Fund |
|---|---|---|
| General Fund | 2,100,000 | owed by the Payroll Fund |
| Water and Sewer Fund | 3,300,000 | owed by the Payroll Fund |
View data as table
| Payroll Fund | 7,200,000 |
|---|---|
| General Fund | 3,000,000 |
| Natural Gas Fund | 1,700,000 |
Findings the Town has not corrected
The Town's problems are not limited to the Payroll Fund. HCT's Schedule of Findings and Responses lists six new material weaknesses and significant deficiencies for fiscal 2024 -- including a general-ledger system management says cannot produce entity-wide financial statements, a lack of segregation of duties in the accounting department, and a years-long dependency on the Town's predecessor auditor to calculate its own annual depreciation. All five findings carried over from the prior year's audit are marked "Repeated," and the auditor states plainly that the Town has not corrected any of them. Separately, the audit applied the Florida Auditor General's required financial-condition assessment procedures and determined the Town shows signs of a deteriorating financial condition under state statute -- the same determination the prior year's audit had already made.
The takeaway
- The Town's own auditor would not vouch for its books at all. A disclaimer of opinion means HCT could not gather enough evidence to say whether Century's fiscal 2024 financial statements are accurate in any respect -- not a qualified opinion with caveats, but no opinion at all.
- A $7.3 million one-year swing traces largely to one internal fund. The Town's total unrestricted net position deficit grew from $1.9 million to $9.2 million between fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, and the Payroll Fund's $6.9 million in newly documented, unbooked debt to three other Town funds accounts for most of that movement.
- None of it was on the books as a receivable. The audit states plainly that the $6.9 million the Payroll Fund owes the Natural Gas Fund, General Fund, and Water and Sewer Fund was never recorded as money owed to those funds -- a gap in the Town's own accounting, not an estimate or a dispute.
- Nothing here is new to the Town, or fixed. Every material weakness and significant deficiency carried over from the prior year's audit is marked "Repeated," the auditor states the Town has not corrected any of them, and the Town missed its own statutory filing deadline for the second year running.
This piece covers the Town of Century's own audited annual financial report for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024 (report dated March 13, 2026), filed with the Florida Auditor General. It does not allege wrongdoing by any named individual -- the audit itself attributes its findings to the Town's systems, controls, and (in general terms) "prior management" and "predecessor management personnel," without naming anyone, and this piece follows that framing. The $7.3 million net-position swing and the 2.8x comparison to annual governmental revenue are this outlet's own arithmetic on figures the report states separately (methods and caveats in analysis.json); the report does not state either figure itself. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary document alone with no access to this draft, independently checked every itemized fact; see verification.json.
Sources(1) ▾
- Town of Century, Florida, audited by HCT Certified Public Accountants & Consultants, LLC, filed with the Florida Auditor General, Town of Century, Florida -- Annual Financial Report, September 30, 2024 (2026-03-13) — The Town's own audited financial statements, footnotes, and the auditor's Schedule of Findings and Responses for fiscal year 2024 (year ended September 30, 2024). Source for the disclaimer of opinion, the unrestricted net position figures, the Payroll Fund's interfund debt and accumulated deficit, the internal-control findings, the late-filing finding, and the deteriorating-financial-condition determination. flauditor.gov · original document
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HCT Certified Public Accountants & Consultants, LLC, the independent firm auditing the Town of Century, Florida, issued a disclaimer of opinion on the Town's fiscal 2024 financial statements -- meaning it could not obtain enough evidence to say whether the numbers are right at all. Underneath that disclaimer, the audit's own tables show the Town's unrestricted net position deficit growing from $1.9 million to $9.2 million in a single year, a $7.3 million swing. A large piece of that swing traces to one line in the footnotes: the Town's own Payroll Fund owed $6.9 million to three other Town funds as of September 30, 2024 -- debt the audit says was never recorded as a receivable on the Town's balance sheet.