OSA Weekly Update - 7/11/2025
1. Message from Auditor Blaha
2. Meeting: Fire Relief Association Working Group
3. Fire Relief Associations: New Financial Dashboard
4. TIF: 2025 TIF Legislation
5. Reminder: 2025 TIF Training – Live Webinars
6. Avoiding Pitfall: Small Entities: Review of Checks
1. Message from Auditor Blaha
Summer is tour time for statewide elected officials, and our office is no exception. This year, I expanded the tour to include private audit firms. Because of the public finance staff shortages, we need all hands-on deck to ensure we have the oversight Minnesotans deserve. The goal of meeting with private firms is to better understand how to make government audits and other engagements attractive to the private market.
As we gather information over the summer, we’d love to hear your ideas on what helps, or hurts, local government entities in their efforts to engage an auditor. Email your responses to Outreach@osa.state.mn.us.
2. Meeting: Fire Relief Association Working Group
The first meeting of this year’s Fire Relief Association Working Group is scheduled for Monday, July 21, from 2 - 3:30 p.m., with options to attend in-person at our office in Saint Paul or remotely via Teams. Meetings also will be livestreamed with recordings and meeting materials available on the OSA website.
3. Fire Relief Associations: New Financial Dashboard
A new financial dashboard is available on the OSA website that provides plan information, membership information, a financial overview, rates of return, and investment asset allocations for fire relief associations. The dashboard also includes a map showing a statewide comparison of relief association funding ratios, benefit levels, and rates of return.
You can also check out our reporting compliance dashboard to see a relief association’s status in meeting its requirements with the OSA to qualify for fire state aid and to view the status of relief association report submissions.
4. TIF: 2025 TIF Legislation
The 2025 Legislature enacted special laws providing exceptions to the TIF Act specific to 15 authorities. It also enacted a few changes to the TIF Act and additional amendments that pertain to how distributions of excess tax increment affect school district aid and levy limits. For more information, see the new TIF Topic article that summarizes the changes.
5. Reminder: 2025 TIF Training – Live Webinars
If you haven’t signed up already, the TIF Division is offering the following training opportunities on topics related to TIF. These training topics will be presented as live webinars at no cost. Recordings of the webinars will also be available after the sessions.
- An Introduction to TIF — Tuesday, July 15, 2-3 p.m.
- Authority Administrators Training — Thursday, July 17, 1:30-3 p.m.
- County Administrators Training — Thursday, July 31, 1:30-3 p.m.
For more information and to register, visit the OSA website.
If you have any questions, contact the TIF Division at TIF@osa.state.mn.us or 651-296-4716.
6. Avoiding Pitfall: Small Entities: Review of Checks
The OSA sometimes discovers evidence of theft that occurred in small entities with a limited number of office personnel because no oversight procedures were developed to counteract the lack of segregation of duties.
A timely review of bank statements and check images (or original checks, if returned by the bank) needs to be performed to detect problem checks. Specifically, the bank statements and check images should be compared to the claims list approved for payment at the prior board/council meeting(s). This brief review should be performed on a monthly basis by someone who is not involved in the writing of checks. For example, in small entities, it could be performed by a town supervisor or city council member.
The review could disclose bank encoding errors, but it could also detect the theft of public funds, such as the issuance of unauthorized checks or the alteration of the payee and/or amount of the check.
The full Avoiding Pitfall is available on the OSA website.