New Haven Independent

The issue arose during a Board of Aldermen Finance Committee meeting last week about the city budget.

Before the committee voted on the new city budget, members asked about the new four-year, $757,000 private contract for the auditor, Woodbridge-based Levitsky & Berney, to look over the city’s books. The firm has had eight years’ involvement in the audit of city finances, and four as the sole auditors.

“In private accounting, don’t you have to switch your auditors every four years?” Carl Goldfield asked.

“There have been federal folks suggesting very strongly that” auditors be regularly changed, Hill Alderwoman Jackson-Brooks recalled. Had the IRS recommended anything like that for New Haven?

“On the contrary: there are many towns and municipalities in the double-digit years with their relationships with auditors,” said city Controller Mark Pietrosimone. He reminded the aldermen of a 2001 ordinance change to the old rule that the current auditor couldn’t bid for the next round. Reason being, he said, that there just wasn’t enough interest in the job by audit firms for the city to be choosy.

That may be because New Haven has changed the way it doles out consulting work to private auditing firms. Now a politically favored firm can make comparable money without the main contract auditing the city budget; they can still be tapped for the audit of special New Haven projects. Normally, odd audit jobs would go straight to the contracted city auditor, but the trend lately has been to share the wealth. Certified public accountants McGladrey and Pullen, a rival bidder to Levitsky and Berney this year, aren’t hurting too badly without the contract: they’ve pocketed $1.8 million to Levitsky and Berney’s $1.6 million in city money since 1995, including $256,835 over the past four years without being the bid-winning auditor. That doesn’t include the work done by McGladrey and Pullen as the auditors for the newly-privatized New Haven Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) with its independent account.

Last week’s questions, though, were about Levitsky and Berney and their now eight-year tenure. “These folks have been doing it awhile, and at one point, I was wondering,” said Goldfield. But he remembered the repeal of the old ordinance. “It’s a hard auditing job, a huge job, and not that remunerative. We weren’t getting enough bids.”

So Levitsky & Berney it is, again.