2025-049 Mendocino County
It Should Continue to Address Its Strained Financial Condition and Can Improve Several Important Operational Processes
Published: December 18, 2025
Audit Recommendations Disclosure
When an audit is completed and a report is issued, auditees must provide the State Auditor with information regarding their progress in implementing recommendations from our reports at three intervals from the release of the report: 60 days, six months, and one year. Additionally, Senate Bill 1452 (Chapter 452, Statutes of 2006), requires auditees who have not implemented recommendations after one year, to report to us and to the Legislature why they have not implemented them or to state when they intend to implement them. Below is a listing of each recommendation the State Auditor made in the report referenced and a link to the most recent response from the auditee addressing their progress in implementing the recommendation and the State Auditor’s assessment of auditee’s response based on our review of the supporting documentation.
Recommendations to Mendocino County
Recommendation 1
To ensure that it maintains a reserve balance sufficient to facilitate its operations during emergencies and serve as a buffer during economic downturns, the county should, before its board adopts its 2026-27 budget, revise its policy on its general fund reserve to incorporate a new target reserve level. In doing so, the county should consider the stability of its revenue sources, the likelihood of unexpected expenditures, and the guidance published by the GFOA. At a minimum, the county’s new reserve level should be no less than the minimum recommended by the GFOA of two months of expenditures.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
March 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Executive Office has drafted an amended policy and anticipates bringing the amended policy to the Board in March 2026.
Recommendation 7
To enhance its safeguards against waste, fraud, and abuse, the county should, by June 2026, amend its purchasing policies to include clearer requirements for the documentation that departments must maintain to support their purchases. These new requirements should include an expectation that departments maintain a receipt or invoice record of what they purchased, they should document the reasons for the purchase, and they should reconcile payments for travel that they made in advance of the trip.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
June 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Board of Supervisors amended Policy 1 (Purchasing, Leasing, and Contracting Policy) on December 16, 2025. The Executive Office has completed a procedural guide to work in conjunction with Policy 1 which includes clearer requirements for documentation. Staff involved in purchasing are in the process of being trained.
The Executive Office will begin working on Policy 18 (Travel and Meal Policy) with the goal of having an amended policy by the recommended date. The Executive Office will reach out to the Auditor’s Office to collaborate on updating the policy.
Recommendation 8
To ensure that it uses asset forfeiture funds only for allowable purposes and to provide transparency and promote accountability for that use, the county should adopt a county policy by June 2026 that does the following:
- Describes the appropriate and inappropriate uses of asset forfeiture funding. The policy should specifically address whether the county allows donations of these funds to private entities, and if it does allow such donations, it should include the ways in which the county will ensure that it protects against political or personal interests influencing such donations.
- Requires that all applicable offices and departments include asset forfeiture funds in the county’s annual budget with a clear description of their intended use.
- Mandates that all offices and departments that receive and use asset forfeiture funding produce an annual report that identifies how they used such funds. The county should make this report available to the public and discuss it at a public board meeting.
- Directs the ACTTC to regularly perform audits of the use of asset forfeiture funds at a prescribed interval, with no more than three years passing between audits.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
June 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
Working with County Counsel on recommendations.
Recommendation 9
To ensure that it closely adheres to advisable contracting practices, the county should, by June 2026, consider sources of best practices, such as the DGS procurement checklist, and revise its contracting and purchasing policies to align with such practices as applicable.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
June 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Board of Supervisors amended Policy 1 (Purchasing, Leasing, and Contracting Policy) on December 16, 2025 which addressed additional components of the Department of General Services’ checklist. The Executive Office will work with County Counsel to continue reviewing Policy 1 to incorporate additional components of the DGS’ checklist as may be applicable, with the goal of having a subsequent amended policy by the recommended date.
Recommendation 10
To ensure that departments justify all sole-source agreements, the county should, by June 2026, develop a sole-source justification expectations document and distribute it to departments. The expectations document should refer to county policy on sole-source procurement and provide examples and explanations of adequate and inadequate justifications.
Agency response status:
Fully implemented
Date of implementation:
Feb. 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Partially Implemented, Department did not address all aspects of the recommendation
60-Day Agency Response
The Board of Supervisors amended Policy 1 (Purchasing, Leasing, and Contracting Policy) on December 16, 2025 which included expectations around exception to bid, including sole source justifications. With the implementation of the amended Policy 1, the process for documenting Exception to Bid has become automated through the contracting system, Cobblestone. Departments are required to answer prompts and/or provide documentation for the exception. Documentation and/or written explanations will include but is not limited to the circumstances leading to the selection of the vendor, including alternative considered, the department’s rationale for selecting the specific vendor, and the basis upon which the department determined the cost to be reasonable. Lastly, the procedural guide provides examples of adequate and inadequate justifications to exception to bids.
Public Reasoning Behind State Auditor 60-Day Assessment
Mendocino County provided evidence showing it has created and provided to staff updated guidance surrounding the exception to bid process. However, the county has not yet created the expectations document that collects this guidance into a single location that department procurement may easily reference. Because the recommendation directs the county to create a single expectations document, our office concludes Mendocino has only partially implemented this recommendation.
Recommendation 11
To ensure that departments properly advertise all contracts for bid and submit those contracts for board consideration, the county should, by March 2026, begin tracking when a department enters into successive contracts with the same vendor for the same services and take action to address such situations with the responsible departments.
Agency response status:
Fully implemented
Date of implementation:
Feb. 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Partially Implemented, Department did not substantiate its claim of full implementation
60-Day Agency Response
The Board of Supervisors amended Policy 1 (Purchasing, Leasing, and Contracting Policy) on December 16, 2025, which included expectations around competitive bidding. The amended policy addresses the issue of contract splitting. Expectations around contract splitting are also documented in the procedural guide. The procedural guide has been distributed to all staff involved in aspects of purchasing during the training held by the Executive Office in January and early February 2026.
Public Reasoning Behind State Auditor 60-Day Agency Assessment
Mendocino County provided evidence showing it has created a process for determining and tracking when departments enter into successive contracts with the same vendor for the same services. The establishment of these processes indicate partial implementation of the recommendation. We look forward to reviewing evidence that the county has implemented these processes during the next recommendation response period.
Recommendation 14
To maximize the county’s accounting system’s capabilities and to ensure consistent documentation of the work its staff perform, the CEO’s Office and the ACTTC’s Office should, by September 2026, collaboratively develop a plan for using more of the system’s capabilities. At a minimum, the plan should address electronic processing of journal entries and bank reconciliations. It should also include goals for how the county will use the system, assign responsibility to specific staff for managing the county’s efforts to reach those goals, and create deadlines for achieving the goals.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
Sept. 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Executive Office and Auditor-Controller’s Office met on January 27, 2026 to discuss each office’s roles and responsibilities. The offices identified a handful of process improvement initiatives to begin with, including journal entry processing via an automated workflow, use of interdepartmental billing module for internal service departmental billing, and first steps in an automated bank reconciliation process. The offices have scheduled monthly check-ins.
Recommendation 16
To ensure that the ACTTC’s Office receives necessary information from departments in a timely manner, the CEO’s Office and the ACTTC’s Office should, by June 2026, collaborate on a protocol that outlines the key expectations for the timeliness and content of these communications. These offices should meet monthly to coordinate and share information about requests that have gone unfulfilled and to identify successful approaches to sharing information that they can replicate.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
June 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Executive Office and Auditor-Controller’s Office met on January 27 2026 to outline each office’s roles and responsibilities. The Auditor-Controller’s office will be creating a policy and procedure and sending out the expectations to departments. The offices have agree the Executive Office will be looped in on communications with departments, when a department is not responsive to the Auditor-Controller Office’s requests. The Executive Office will hold departments accountable to ensure there re timely and complete responses to the Auditor Controller’s Office. The offices have scheduled monthly check-ins.
Recommendations to Mendocino County Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder-Elections Office
Recommendation 2
To ensure that the county does not lose property tax revenue because of delayed assessments, the Assessor’s Office should, by March 2026, develop tools such as aging reports showing the length of time since qualifying events, to assist in the management of its assessment workloads. These tools should, at a minimum, allow staff and managers to identify which properties are at highest risk for lost property tax revenue if the county does not assess them in a timely fashion.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
Mar. 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Assessor’s office has worked with the County of Mendocino’s Information Technology department and have successfully created an aged report for building permits. The building permits are entered in Aumentum as of the issuance date of the permit. In some cases, the permit exists however, the project has not begun. For these instances, the Assessor’s office checks on the project on an annual basis until the permit either expires or is re-instated. If there is a percentage of completed new construction, as of the lien date, January 1, the Assessor’s office will enroll the value for the partially completed new construction and will be included on the annual secured tax roll. The permit will remain open in Aumentum until the new construction is completed and a new Proposition base year value will be set for the portion of completed new construction, at which time the permit will be completed and the workflow advanced.
The aged report for transfers continues to be a work in progress. Our IT department has met with Aumentum several times and is currently awaiting assistance from Aumentum’s engineering staff. The current issue involves the workflow to PIN relationship in the case of multi-PIN transfers. When there should be one transfer per PIN, the report is multiplying the number of transfers by the number of legal parties’ times the document. As an example involving a multi-PIN transfer of 11 PINs, with multiple owners, the report should indicate 11 transfers, however, it is listing 111 transfers, which is not correct. We do have the change of ownership date which was not available in our last report, which is an enormous benefit and we are able to identify older events, however, many of these events are not valid transfers as they are conversion issues needing to be researched and addressed in Aumentum.
Recommendation 4
To ensure its staff’s ability to appropriately and efficiently resolve issues with its property tax system, the Assessor’s Office should, by June 2026, document clear policies and procedures pertaining to property tax assessments and the management of property tax-related information in its system.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
June 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Assessor’s office has begun collecting procedures on a share drive and various staff have begun documenting processes complete with procedures for each task they perform. This is an incredibly laborious feat, but one we are slowly accomplishing. We have informally begun researching policies and are still in preliminary stages.
Recommendation 18
To safeguard the county against poor performance by elections-related vendors, the Elections Office should, as soon as possible, secure a contract agreement with its ballot printing vendor that specifies the compensation the vendor will receive and how the county will address poor contractor performance.
Agency response status:
Fully implemented
Date of implementation:
Feb. 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Fully implemented
60-Day Agency Response
The Assessor, Clerk Recorder’s office worked with the vendor and our County Counsel for several months securing and executing a contract with Secretary of State Approved ballot print vendor “Mailing Systems, Inc” (MSI), the contract includes performance standards and remedies for errors. The contract is available for the public on the county contracting website “Cobblestone”. This contract was routed, signed and finalized on 2/4/2026.
Recommendation 19
To provide assurance that it has placed all voters in the correct precinct, the Elections Office should review all voter precinct assignments and verify that they are correct before the next county election. The Elections Office should prioritize reviewing the placement of voters who live in areas of the county that may be at higher risk of misplacement, such as areas where voting district boundaries have changed recently. When it completes this review, the Elections Office should report the results to the board and identify the potential impact on any previous elections.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
Aug. 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Elections office is continuing to check voter placement. With the Congressional District (CD) redistricting, our office was able to utilize a redistricting consultant to help with voter placements and moving effected voters from CD 2 into the new CD 1. We continue this process verifying those areas that were involved in the 2021 Statewide Redistricting. We concentrated and completed our review with the precincts that are involved in the June 2, 2026 Primary Election. We anticipate the countywide review will be completed by August 2026.
Recommendation 20
To ensure that it assigns voters to the correct precincts when voting district boundaries change, the Elections Office should, by June 2026, create procedures for responding to district boundary changes. These procedures should include using automated assistance from GIS or similar automated approaches to making assignments. They should also identify the steps that Elections Office staff will take to review a sample of assignments from high-risk areas to determine whether voters’ placements are correct.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
June 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Election office has prepared a DRAFT guide on redistricting that we continue to review as the office collaborates with the County’s GIS Administrator, the County’s Election Management vendor and the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials Parcel Split Guide. This will be complete by June 2026.
Recommendations to Mendocino County Auditor-Controller Treasurer-Tax Collectors Office
Recommendation 3
To recoup unpaid property tax payments to the degree possible, the ACTTC should continue to take steps to resume holding regular default tax property auctions by October 2026. If the ACTTC’s Office needs external assistance to hold the auction on time, it should obtain such assistance.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
10/31/2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The ACTTC’s Office continues to work on the process of resuming auctions, is continuing to monitor other Counties that are holding auctions soon to gain additional information and is developing a plan for contracting services to assist in Mendocino’s required auction processes. The ACTTC has informed the Board of Supervisors that contractors will be used to assist in the upcoming auction. It is not yet determined of the dollar amount of those contracts will require Board approval or if they require a lower purchasing authority level. The ACTTC anticipates making a determination regarding specific contracting services in the next 30 days.
Recommendation 12
To ensure the consistency and efficiency of its operations, the ACTTC’s Office should revise its timeline for creating policies and procedures for key responsibilities, including bank reconciliations and journal entries, by March 2026. It should then follow this timeline.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
3/31/2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The ACTTC’s Office is working with the CEO’s Office Information Technology Division on software permissioning and the ACTTC’s Office is drafting policy and procedure for journal entries. The implementation of bank reconciliation functionality will require re-configuration of the software by the software vendor before the County can begin using the feature. The ACTTC’s Office has requested the CEO’s Office Information Technology Division request that service from the vendor. The ability to use both features is necessary before it is possible to fully develop the policies and procedures for those two tasks. The ACTTC’s Office is evaluating and prioritizing other policies and procedures for key responsibilities and will have a timeline in place by the end of March 2026.
Recommendation 13
To maximize the county’s accounting system’s capabilities and to ensure consistent documentation of the work its staff perform, the CEO’s Office and the ACTTC’s Office should, by September 2026, collaboratively develop a plan for using more of the system’s capabilities. At a minimum, the plan should address electronic processing of journal entries and bank reconciliations. It should also include goals for how the county will use the system, assign responsibility to specific staff for managing the county’s efforts to reach those goals, and create deadlines for achieving the goals.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
9/30/2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The CEO’s Office and the ACTTC’s Office met on January 27, 2026, to discuss each office’s roles and responsibilities. The Offices identified three process improvement initiatives to begin efforts to system automation: journal entry processing using automated workflow, interdepartmental billing for service departments, and automated bank reconciliation. The automated bank reconciliation process will require software vendor configuration, which the CEO’s Office Information Technology Division is requesting the vendor schedule. The Offices have scheduled monthly meetings to continue monitoring progress on the initiatives and explore additional possible opportunities for efficiencies.
Recommendation 15
To ensure that the ACTTC’s Office receives necessary information from departments in a timely manner, the CEO’s Office and the ACTTC’s Office should, by June 2026, collaborate on a protocol that outlines the key expectations for the timeliness and content of these communications. These offices should meet monthly to coordinate and share information about requests that have gone unfulfilled and to identify successful approaches to sharing information that they can replicate.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
6/30/2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The CEO’s Office and the ACTTC’s Office met on January 27, 2026, to outline each Office’s roles and responsibilities. The ACTTC’s Office is currently working on a policy and procedure outlining the deadlines and expectations for other departments relating to submitting timely and accurate financial information to the ACTTC’s Office. The Offices have agreed that the CEO’s Office will be included in communications with departments, when a department is not responsive to the ACTTC’s Office requests. The CEO’s Office has committed to holding department accountable to ensure there are timely and complete responses to the ACTTC’s Office. The Offices have scheduled monthly check-in meetings to monitor compliance.
Recommendation 17
To ensure that the county is fully prepared to address future changes resulting from new accounting standards, the ACTTC’s Office should, by June 2026, establish a plan for how it will approach these changes. At a minimum, the plan should designate which staff in the ACTTC’s Office are responsible for monitoring changes in relevant standards and specify how the office will communicate with other county departments about their responsibilities for gathering, analyzing, and providing required information.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
6/30/2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The ACTTC’s Office is developing a plan for evaluating new accounting standards and expects to have it documented by June 2026.
Recommendation to Mendocino County Board of Supervisors
Recommendation 5
To ensure that it addresses its persistent budget deficit, the board should, by March 2026, create a schedule outlining the steps it will take to address its stagnant tax revenue and increasing expenditures. This schedule should include board meetings or town halls with the express purpose of discussing the spending areas the county wishes to prioritize for reduction and options for the county to increase revenue, such as by increasing tax rates. The board’s goal should be for the 2026-27 budget it adopts to reflect the results of this process to the maximum extent possible.
Agency response status:
Not fully implemented
Date of implementation:
March 2026
State Auditor assessment status:
Pending
60-Day Agency Response
The Executive Office has completed a revenue analysis to identify how much revenue would be created from a potential general sales tax.
Based on current taxable sales levels reported by the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) a 1/4-cent (.25%) sales tax could generate: approximately $5.5M annually if applied across all incorporated and unincorporated areas; or approximately $2.2M annually if limited to unincorporated areas.
Actual revenue would vary depending on total taxable sales, exemptions, and any concurrent local measures reaching the statutory cap of 9.25%. As a note, two of the four incorporated cities in Mendocino County are at the 9.25% cap. If it is the will of the Board to have the tax be countywide the Board could appeal to the legislature to raise the cap.
The Board of Supervisors will work with the Executive Office, Assessor, Auditor-Controller, and Treasurer-Tax Collector on the creation of a schedule to outline steps it will take to address its stagnant tax revenue and increasing expenditures.
Mid-year budget presentations will be on February 24, 2026.
Recommendation to the Legislature
Recommendation 6
If the Legislature wishes to restrict to certain purposes local governments’ use of asset forfeiture funds, it should amend the Substances Act to specify those purposes. For example, the Legislature could restrict the use of these funds to only law enforcement purposes.
Agency response status:
Pending
