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Cheryl Dillingham doesn’t particularly like the spotlight. She decided to run for the county’s demanding auditor-controller position last year despite being intensely camera-shy, averse to public speaking and reluctant to clash with the embattled incumbent, Karen Paz Dominguez, whom she respects.

However, once you get Dillingman talking about numbers, systems and spreadsheets — and the progress her office has made in catching up on the huge backlog of delinquent fiscal reporting she inherited — her eyes start to light up. 

“Everybody’s working really well together,” she said during an interview at her office on Tuesday. “Everybody’s working really hard. … I’m working to develop a team that gets the work done and can keep getting the work done. And [other county] departments have been very cooperative and helpful.”

Dillingham stepped into the role of auditor-controller on July 1 of last year, a few weeks after her landslide election victory but fully six months before she was scheduled to take office. She started early because county administrators had reached a separation agreement with Paz Dominguez, whose abbreviated term was characterized by bitter, often public conflicts with county staff, department heads and supervisors. She was the subject of third-party investigations, a censure from the Board of Supervisors, several votes of “no confidence” and a scathing report from the Humboldt County Civil Grand Jury. 

Before she left office, though, the State of California sued the county and Paz Dominguez, in both her personal and professional capacities, for failure to comply with government-mandated financial reporting requirements. 

That lawsuit has now been resolved. Per the terms of a settlement agreement reached last August, the county, which covered Paz Dominguez’s attorney fees, submitted a detailed action plan for filing its overdue budgets and reports and agreed to pay $12,000 in fines (or “forfeitures”) to the California Department of Justice. Dillingham told the Outpost that the DOJ confirmed receipt of the county’s $12,000 check on Monday. The attorney representing the state confirmed to the Times-Standard Monday that the county has met its obligations and the case has been resolved.

Now more than a year into her first term, Dillingham said her office has made good progress toward catching up on overdue fiscal reporting. 

“When I ran and when I got elected, I felt like the general consensus on priorities was to get the audits done, to get things reconciled [and] to get mandated reports done, and so those have been my priorities,” she said.

According to the County Administrative Office, Dillingham implemented a corrective action plan to get the county caught up on its mandated financial reporting, and her office is now caught up on submitting financial transaction reports and budgets. 

The A-C’s Office has also caught up on journal entries and bank reconciliations, and delays and errors with payroll have decreased significantly, according to the CAO’s Office.

Mary Ann Hansen, director of the nonprofit First 5 Humboldt, said her dealings the Auditor-Controller’s Office have vastly improved.

“Things have been smooth and transparent, and communication has been clear this past fiscal year,” she told the Outpost via text. “When we recently asked the ACO for the documents that we needed for our annual independent audit, we received them immediately, paving the way for our audit to be completed on time this year! It’s not only been a relief, but we’ve had to commit less staff time to repeated communications.”

Dillingham acknowledged that her staff isn’t completely caught up yet. When she took over last summer, the office was more than two years behind in closing its monthly budget reporting — the process by which the general ledger gets reconciled with the Treasurer-Tax Collector to ensure that records match what’s actually in the county’s coffers. Dillingham and her staff have reduced that two-year backlog by more than half.

The county is also still behind on submitting its annual single audits, though Dillingham said progress has been made on that front, too. Her office wrapped up the overdue audit for the 2020-21 fiscal year, and she said the 2021-22 audit is nearly ready to go.

“We’re basically closed and queued up and ready to start the next audit, whereas that was not the case this time last year,” she said.

Because of the county’s recent history of delinquent fiscal reporting, it has had outside accounting firm Clifton Larsen Allen perform two so-called “national reviews,” examining the county’s audits to make sure they  meet minimum standards and that everything required to be tested gets tested.

“It’s getting a lot of scrutiny,” Dillingham said, “which I believe perhaps would not be the case if we were more current and didn’t have quite so many challenges.”

While payroll problems have decreased, employees in some county departments, including the Sheriff’s Office and the Department of Health and Human Services, are still using paper timecards, despite the fact that both county supervisors and the CAO’s Office have urged a transition to fully electronic timekeeping systems.  

Dillingham said the county has been reviewing various software systems in hopes of finding one that can accommodate the complex needs of various its departments, some of which operate on a 24/7 basis, and its distinct labor bargaining units, which each have their own memorandum of understanding governing wages and benefits. 

“Paper timecards may not be ideal, but we’ve used them for hundreds of years and they do work,” Dillingham remarked. “And sometimes the priority is to fix the things that don’t work.”

The Auditor-Controller’s Office now has 16 of its 19 allocated positions filled — up from 12 of 19 a year ago — and Dillingham said she has been working on getting those employees trained on as many tasks as possible. For example, she had some staffers complete the reports necessary to get the state’s lawsuit dismissed.

“Part of the reason I had staff do it is because I didn’t want to be the only person in the world that knew how to do something,” Dillingham said, “because I think that’s a little bit of what got us into trouble in the first place.”

She noted that shortly before Paz Dominguez took office, quite a few long-term employees from both the Auditor-Controller’s Office and other departments had left the county’s employ, resulting in a mass exodus of institutional knowledge and not much of a succession plan. 

“It was very hard, and I can only imagine the struggles of trying to figure all that out,” Dillingham said. 

She’s been having her staff take online courses from the Government Finance Officers Association and encouraging them to network with employees of other counties at property tax conferences and the like. She’s already working to develop a succession plan for her own eventual departure, whenever that may be.