There’s plenty of finger-pointing to go around when the county discovered at the 11th hour last week that its budget contained a phantom $470,000 in revenues.

Scrambling at the last minute to locate additional revenue or slash positions, salaries and benefits is no way to go through the budgeting process.

The problem arose when the county auditor’s office listed a $470,000 grant twice in the revenue figures. Camouflaging the mistake was the fact the line item was given two different names and the figures differed just slightly – $470,422 for one entry and $470,451 for the other.

Some online readers of this paper have chastised the Commissioners Court for failing to notice the double entry. There’s some culpability there — they could have each individually walked down the hall and read the proposed budget on file at the county clerk’s office any time between Aug. 14 and the day the budget was adopted. But in fairness, it should be noted that the commissioners didn’t have the printed copy of the budget in their hands until the very day they adopted it. It is likely they saw no reason to give the proposed budget a closer look.

The court is charged with oversight but it reasonably counts on the auditor’s office to produce legitimate numbers. This is not the first time Susana Morón’s office has provided budget figures to the court that proved unreliable. Again there’s plenty of finger pointing to be done in each case.

This is not to say Morón isn’t a good person or doesn’t mean well. These are just errors coming from a department that is supposed to find the errors, not create them.

The county auditor is hired by the three district judges serving Bee County and, by design, this is to keep politics out of the auditor’s office.

That’s a good thing. The county doesn’t need politics in the auditor’s office. It does need reasonable accuracy.

The question is how do the district judges define acceptable business practices? Must we elect only CPAs to our commissioners court?