Tennessee County's Books Have Failed the Same Test for 12+ Years

For at least 12 consecutive annual audits, Polk County, Tennessee -- whose governments took in $21.3 million in total revenue in fiscal 2025 -- has kept its highway department's accounting records outside the system state law requires, and the same fiscal year 2025 annual financial report, released March 10, 2026, says the county still hasn't fixed it.▸ That report lists twelve findings against Polk County's books, seven of them repeats, and adds a $250,000 school-fund loan that was never repaid on schedule, a $300,000 accounting correction, and tens of thousands of dollars in spending the county commission never authorized. It is the third consecutive audit cycle in which Comptroller Jason Mumpower has told the county, in almost identical language, that the same problems keep recurring.

Polk County operates under the state's Fiscal Control Acts of 1957, which require the county's director of accounts and budgets -- not the highway department itself -- to keep the highway department's books.▸ It hasn't happened. As of the audit covering fiscal year 2022⧉, released March 2023, the finding "has been repeated over the last 11 annual audits and has not been addressed" -- the same audit that gave Polk County 14 total findings, the most of any of Tennessee's 95 counties that year. A year later, the audit covering fiscal year 2023⧉ reported the finding "has been repeated over the last 12 annual audits and has not been corrected."

Comptroller Mumpower's public response has followed nearly the same script each time.▸ In March 2023: "Our auditors shouldn't have to write the same finding year after year." In March 2024, after Polk County's total findings fell to 11 but eight of them were repeats: "For the past two years, Polk County has had several findings that have gone uncorrected. ... It's my expectation that county leaders and the audit committee will take the necessary steps." The finding did not go away. Polk County's total findings dropped further, to nine, in the audit covering fiscal year 2024⧉ -- and the highway-recordkeeping finding, filed that year as 2024-001 and 2024-002, was still there, undisputed: "I concur with this finding," both the county executive's office and the highway superintendent wrote.

Responding to the same finding in the newest audit, Polk County's highway superintendent pointed to an attempted fix: the county legislative body "voted on a resolution passing a private act in a meeting in February 2024 to eliminate this finding."▸ That vote came roughly five months before the fiscal year 2025 audit period even began. The finding showed up again anyway, filed this time as 2025-001 and 2025-002, with the state's auditors writing that a finding reported for "three or more consecutive years... indicates that management is either unwilling or unable to address the deficiency."

The highway department wasn't the only office cited.▸ In the school system's Central Cafeteria Fund, auditors found the fund had borrowed $250,000 from the General Purpose School Fund through a revenue anticipation note to cover cash flow -- state law requires such notes retired by the close of the fiscal year they're issued in, and none of it had been repaid by June 30, 2025. The same fund needed a $300,000 audit adjustment just to state its payables correctly. Two school funds ended the year with deficits in unassigned fund balance: $3,820 in the School Federal Projects Fund and $20,602 in the Central Cafeteria Fund, the latter driven directly by that unretired note.

Elsewhere in the school department's books, salaries exceeded budgeted line-item appropriations by amounts ranging from $36 to $47,201 across fifteen separate line items, and the Special Education Program spent $44,444 more than the county commission had approved for it at the legal level of budgetary control -- spending state law and the county's own budget resolution both say wasn't authorized.▸ Auditors also found funds sitting uncollected for days at a time: the misdemeanor probation office held some receipts 4 to 9 days before depositing them, and the circuit and general sessions courts clerk's office held others 4 to 18 days, both beyond the three-business-day deposit window state law sets -- a gap auditors said "weakens internal controls over collections and increases the risks of fraud and misappropriation."