Currently at the City, there are over 100 fiscal staff enterprise-wide, including 35 employees assigned within individual departments. This decentralization can cause inefficiencies and inconsistencies in our financial operations and is regularly cited as a weakness in our annual audit.
To help address the challenges that come with this structure, today, the City of Syracuse is launching a financial operations pilot project. The pilot directly supports the City’s objective to Achieve Fiscal Sustainability. Addressing a key audit finding is also one of the Key Results in the City’s Performance Management Program, which will launch on September 5th.
The pilot brings together financial employees from three city departments as a Tiger Team, to work together in a centralized manner. Throughout the pilot, we will analyze outcomes to ensure that we have data support for future decisions. It will allow us to evaluate centralized financial operations and develop processes to align with financial and operational best practices.
We hope that the pilot will produce several outcomes:
Allow us to evaluate centralized financial operations
Develop processes to align with financial best practices
Collect and analyze data to support for future decisions
If this pilot is successful, we will scale it, and create enterprise-wide centralization during the second half of the fiscal year (January to June). Over the next year, this process will be paired with other planned improvements to ensure that Syracuse has the financial management and resources to operate as a sustainable, best-in-class community.