Preliminary Follow-up Report: An Audit of the Salt Lake County Council's Travel Expenses

AUDITOR’S LETTER

September 25, 2026

Under the authority of Utah Code Title 17, Chapter 69, Part 3, “Powers and Duties,” and consistent with Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards, this office tracks whether the recommendations we issue are acted on.

This is the preliminary follow-up report for An Audit of the Salt Lake County Council’s Travel Expenses, issued in May 2025. That audit reported five findings and eight recommendations. Most of them shared a single theme: travel packets were reaching Mayor’s Finance without the documentation needed to show that a reimbursement was correct.

We commend Council staff for the work reflected in this follow-up. Council staff developed and adopted an Internal Travel Guide, effective June 25, 2025, and built two tools around it — a Documentation Checklist the Travel Coordinator completes before any packet is submitted, and an Annual Travel Tracking Spreadsheet that logs each travel occurrence, the forms used, and what documentation remains outstanding.

Of the eight recommendations, our status is as follows:
• Six recommendations (75%) are implemented.
• One recommendation (12.5%) is in progress.
• One recommendation (12.5%) could not be tested.

The recommendation still in progress concerns the Council’s internal requirement that travel documentation be submitted to the Travel Coordinator within 30 days of return. Three of the four packets we tested met the timeframe; in the fourth, the hotel folio had not reached the Travel Coordinator when we began our review on June 10, 2026. The recommendation we could not test concerns hotel-room upgrades: the Council established a policy for how upgrades should be handled, but none of the packets we tested this period involved an upgrade, so there was nothing to test the new control against. We identified no countywide policy violations in the transactions tested.

The scope of this review covered actions taken between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026.

Council staff gave us prompt access to the travel packets, the Internal Travel Guide, and the tracking records we asked for, and answered our questions directly. We appreciate the Council’s cooperation and its continued commitment to strengthening these controls.

Chris Harding, CPA, CFE, CIA

Salt Lake County Auditor