Update

Why the audit calendar matters more than it sounds

Published September 22, 2026

First, a confession. I am not a financial expert. I am not an accountant, I have no background in municipal finance, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I am is somebody who sat down with the Town’s own documents and tried to understand them well enough to explain them to myself. That is the whole exercise here. If something below makes sense to you, it is because it finally made sense to me. And because I am not an expert, I am going to quote the Town’s own words wherever I can rather than tell you what I think they mean.

This is also not the fun part of the job. Nobody puts up a lawn sign about audited financial statements. But the finances are what let the town operate at all, and what decide whether it can grow. Every road, every hire, every grant application runs through them.

What the record shows

Let me start with what the Town is doing right, because it matters.

Cochrane has a real external auditor. KPMG LLP has audited the Town’s books for years, and the opinions have been clean. On January 27, 2026, council adopted the 2024 audited financial statements by Resolution 2026-30. The resolution is worth reading, because it states the law plainly: council adopted the statements “prepared in accordance with section 294.1 of the Municipal Act, 2001,” and directed the Treasurer “to post a copy of the audited financial statements on the municipal website within 60 days, in accordance with section 295.” That is the correct standard, written by the Town, in the Town’s own resolution.

The issue is not whether the work gets done. It is when.

The dashed line is the Town’s own target: its auditor RFP says the audit “must be done prior to May 31 for each auditing year.” The 2025 bar is measured to September 22, 2026 and keeps growing.

The Town’s audits used to land in the spring. The 2018 and 2019 statements each reached council about five months after year end. Since then the gap has widened every cycle: six months for 2020, nine for 2021, eleven for 2022, eleven again for 2023, and thirteen for the 2024 statements, which came to council on January 27, 2026. The 2025 statements have not been tabled at all. They are now about nine months past that year end, already past the Town’s own target, and the number grows every week.

The Town’s own deadline

For comparison, here is the standard the Town set for itself. When council appointed its auditor through RFP 2018-27, the request for proposals said plainly: “Completion of the audit must be done prior to May 31 for each auditing year.” That is not an outside benchmark. That is Cochrane’s own procurement document.

Where do the 2025 statements stand right now? The first quarter variance report from the Office of the Treasurer, Report 2026-34 dated May 12, 2026, put it this way: “The 2025 actuals are not final as some accounting entries are completed during the audit.” That was in May. We are now in late September.

I want to be fair about why. This term has seen real turnover in senior finance and administration, and Cochrane is not alone in that. Northern Ontario municipalities have been losing experienced managers across the board. Rebuilding a finance function takes time, and the people doing that work are carrying a heavy load. None of this is a complaint about the staff doing it.

Why the timing is not just paperwork

The audited statements feed the Financial Information Return that the Town files with the Province. The Province then uses that return to calculate the Annual Repayment Limit, which is the legal ceiling on what Cochrane may borrow. You can see the lag in the Town’s own records: the 2021 Annual Repayment Limit, $3,126,872, was calculated from the 2019 Financial Information Return.

Cochrane’s own debt limit

Cochrane also holds itself to a tighter line than the Province requires, and that is to the Town’s credit. Provincial regulation permits debt servicing costs up to 25% of operating revenue. The Town’s own Debt Management and Capital Financing Policy, FI-007, sets the target at 10%, with a second test capping annual financing at 50% of capital spending for the year. That is a deliberately conservative policy and it was the right call.

Here is the part that took me a while to work out. FI-007 defines its own measurements by Financial Information Return line number. Debt service cost is defined as FIR line 74-3099. Direct debt is FIR 74-9910. Net revenue fund revenues are FIR 10-9910. The Town’s own 10% test is built directly on the return, and the return is built on the audit. The policy also says that compliance with these limits “will be reported on annually to Council.”

So the self-imposed limit is not a separate safeguard that keeps working when the audit is late. It runs on the same fuel. When the audit slips, the return slips, and both the provincial ceiling and Cochrane’s own tighter ceiling are being measured against older information.

That reporting has happened before. Council accepted an internal compliance review in May 2016, and the 2021 budget update charted debt servicing against the 10% policy maximum, forecasting between 8.6% and 9.2% of revenues through 2025. Those are useful numbers, and they are also close enough to the ceiling that the annual check is worth doing. What I have not been able to find is a compliance report for this term. If one exists and I have missed it, I will correct this page.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of place where a non-expert can overreach. A late audit does not automatically mean the Town has borrowed improperly. The Province anticipates this: the repayment limit certificate itself says that before council authorizes any long term debt, “this limit must be adjusted by the Treasurer in the prescribed manner.” There is a mechanism. My concern is not that a rule has been broken. It is that the reporting which would let any of us check has not been showing up on schedule.

A new council, a new CFO, an old picture

Work on the 2027 budget should be starting about now. A new council will be sworn in this fall, and several of the people around that table will be new to municipal finance. They will be joined by a Chief Financial Officer who is also brand new, in a position that did not exist until council supported creating it on August 20, 2026 and delegated the hiring to the CAO. Adding that role was a sensible move. But it means the people setting the levy and the tax rate, and deciding what gets built and what waits, will nearly all be new to the file at the same time.

And the most recent audited picture available to them is December 31, 2024. That is two years of distance between the last verified set of books and the budget they will be voting on.

Take debt as the example. The 2024 audited statements, at Note 17, set out the Town’s term loans and long-term debt line by line, with the lender, the interest rate, the monthly payment, and the maturity date for each one. That is a real, verified number as of December 31, 2024. What has been executed since then is not yet in any audited document the public can read. So when residents hear different figures for what the Town owes, there is no way for anyone outside the building to settle it. Not because anyone is hiding anything, but because the document that would settle it has not been tabled yet.

That is the whole argument for making stability the priority. Not because the basics are exciting, but because everything else depends on them. You cannot set a responsible levy without knowing where you stand. You cannot test compliance with your own debt policy without the return that policy is written in terms of. You cannot bring a new council and a new CFO up to speed on numbers that do not exist yet.

What I would push for

None of this requires anyone to be blamed for anything.

Get the 2025 statements to council and posted, and let the auditor walk the new council through them in open session, not as a formality but as a briefing.
Restore the May 31 completion target the Town already wrote into its own procurement documents, and if that is not achievable in a given year, say so publicly and say why.
Deliver the annual FI-007 compliance report that the debt policy already requires, so council can see where we sit against both the 25% provincial ceiling and our own 10% target.
Report the Financial Information Return filing date to council each year, so the audit, the return, and the borrowing limits are visibly connected.
Give every new member of council, and the incoming CFO, a plain-language financial position briefing before the first budget meeting.

None of that requires an accounting degree to ask for. That is rather the point. If a resident without a finance background can read the Town’s own policy and then find the year’s compliance report, the system is working. Right now I could find the policy. I could not find this term’s report.

Stabilizing the basics is not the flashy part of the job. It is the part that makes the rest of it honest.

Candidates’ Night is September 28 at Transfiguration Hall. If you are going, this is a fair question to bring.

Sources

If you spot something I have missed or got wrong, write to me at dan4cochrane@gmail.com and I will correct it. Corrections are noted below.

Updates and corrections

September 22, 2026. First published.
September 22, 2026. Corrected the 2025 figure. The first version said the 2025 statements were close to twenty-one months past year end. That was an arithmetic error on my part. December 31, 2025 to today is about nine months. The chart and the text have been fixed. The 2025 audit is past the Town’s own May 31 target, but it is not yet as late as the 2022, 2023 and 2024 cycles ended up being.

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