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There is something fishy with the audit. It does not take 13 months for an audit to be completed because of vacation schedules. An auditors first objective when beginning an audit is to have it completed as close to the 6/30/18 date as possible. The auditor is responsible for reporting anything that occurs between start of the audit period, in this case 7/1/17 and the date they issue the audit. No auditor want to be responsible for a 25 month audit window. The only explanation for this delay is they are having difficulties obtaining the audit evidence required to sign off on the audit.

Secondly, just because the auditors eventually give a clean opinion that does not mean everything is good. That just means they were able to satisfy themselves that the statements fairly represent the City of Warwick financial position. The cause of the delay can be found in the Letter to Management. Every audit comes with a Letter to Management, this is where the auditor spells out all of the difficulties encountered while conducting the audit.

If you want to know all of the problems uncovered during the audit, you need the Letter to Management. My guess is the auditors could not rely on the accounting records produced by the city and had to do a lot of additional work to figure out what the city finances really were