Getting office staffed is first priority for new county auditor Rieman

Rieman won a contentious election against Jason Gibson, a senior accountant from the auditor’s office, who has since left for another job. Of the four accountant positions in the seven-person auditor’s office, two are currently open. The auditor’s office manages the county’s finances, and the auditor serves as the county’s budget officer and de facto chief financial officer. Currently the office is also playing a key role in implementation of new county-wide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. ERP software automates organizations so they can manage their business processes more efficiently.

CoMoBUZ caught up with Rieman earlier this week for a quick interview as he takes over his new position. Following are lightly-edited excerpts:

On immediate changes to the office:

No, not really. The county is already in the midst of change just because we’ve lost a lot of legacy officeholders like June Pitchford, Dan Atwill and some others that came out a few years earlier, like Wendy Noren and Karen Miller, etc. In a lot of ways they've left pretty good structure. But there's an adaptation that's coming just with new eyes on things and a lot of new faces and new leadership.

On transition to the county’s new ERP system:

It's a big a big part of things. We're working on it. Basically, there's two modules, you've got the HR and payroll side and you've got the finance enterprise budgeting module side. We've been working on both and the goal is still to get both of them live in 2023. I think part of it is strain on the offices because it's such a large system that the way they kind of structured with decision makers, process owners, to be able to test their own, but they didn't dedicate staff to do that. So the only time that they find to be able to test it is with the existing staff. So a lot of it's been kind of put on pause, unfortunately. But there's also some good reason to put stuff on pause because there's a lot of these decisions that were made a year or two ago with different decision makers and the climate kind of changing in terms of looking at things different or how we're structured a little different. Everyone seems very open to those conversations and so far, which is great. It’s definitely a collaborative approach in talking to all the other officeholders, existing and new. So it's been a refreshing experience in many ways.

A lot of things are still very paper driven. It's kind of harder to get some of these policies flushed out when you have 13 independent elected officials and trying to get them to agree on a centralized process on some of these things, if there's not the necessity for it. I think that necessity has been kind of growing more and more over time, and we're now coming to terms with that and addressing the policies and systems and creating processes to adapt and evolve.

I have a lot of experience working on different ERPs so a lot of it is trying to figure out how this one works. We are at a good opportunity to be able to, since it's not fully implemented, if we wanted to shift or change some of the things or rework some of the modules, we can do that now and test it before it goes live and reconfigure some of this stuff if it makes sense for the county. But we also have a lot of infrastructure that's already been put in place by June that is also a good starting place.

On priorities:

My number one priority is going to be to get staffed and get everyone trained and up to speed. June’s retirement is a huge loss to the county with her 32 years of experience. She's done a great job of doing what you can to document and put everything down but there's still a lot that is just good to know. I will never be as proficient in the old system, because there's no reason for me to spend the time to get proficient when I'm moving to the new one this quickly. So that's information that is going to be lost over time.

Again, the core functions are definitely the priority the first year and going through a complete cycle. It's very cyclical job like most finance offices where some of the stuff you only do once a year. You're not going to touch it again till the following year. Budget is on a calendar year basis and we just passed the 2023 budget so we'll be implementing that and closing out the prior year working on our annual financial reports and our audit. Most of this winter and spring is going to be focusing on the financial reports, the audit and getting staffed and getting up to speed.

On working with new Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick:

I’m looking forward to it. I think he's pretty excited, like I think we're all excited to get in here and get to work. You know, both of us having somewhat of a prior working relationship at the state and are excited to be able to bring some of that knowledge and expertise to the county and we’ve been able to kind of relate on how the county is maybe different from what we experienced at the state, or similar. That's been good for us to be able to talk about.

On running for election:

I did not like campaigning at all. I know I made that pretty clear. I definitely think that this is the type of position that shouldn't really be a partisan or political one. I definitely won't be treating it that way in office. In general, I'm just not a big fan of what campaigns offer, at least in the 2020’s. It's all social media and a bunch of stuff that really probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things for what is really going on. There was often where I’d like to have talked more candid with people about what can we really do or what's the real issues here, but typically, they wanted to talk about the more controversial topics on the national scene or the state scene.

On the near future:

I think the county is definitely going to be in a like a kind of a metamorphosis cocoon for 2023 is my guess. But you know, everyone's going to be coming in and kind of learning new stuff and how to how to adapt and maybe retool or use the tools that we're starting to retool on. I think everyone agrees there's lots of room for improvement and wants to do that together and talk about that, at least in the conversations I've had with the other elected officials. So I'm hopeful that after we get through the first year that we'll start to see some movement. And hopefully, we'll start to see some of that take place in the 2024 budget. So I don't know that we're going see a lot of change in 2023.

On county financial health:

We're in a fairly fortunate place. Generally, we have a pretty healthy balance sheet. Boone County is definitely, from a finance perspective, very clean and ran very well. We've got a good history and a lot of our policies and procedures and things are built on valuing proper controls, checks and balances, trying to do what's right and in the best interest of the office holders and the county, which is good. You don't run into some of these other issues that you get in other counties that we've seen.