The Jackson County website page for the Chancery Clerk has copies of all audits going back to 1999. Within the first few pages of any year’s audit, you will find something similar to this.
Essentially, the county should be auditing the entities on the list, since the county “owns” them. Singing River is always on this list. Flipping over to the summary of results:
A qualified opinion is not a good thing. Generally this means that not enough information was available, or the audit does not conform to accounting standards. You can see above that for governmental activities, a qualified opinion was given. For “component units” (Singing River, library, port etc.) an adverse opinion was given. An adverse opinion is one in which the auditor finds that the organization misstated the numbers, or is departing from accounting standards. An unqualified opinion is favorable, as was given for the other activities/funds. The auditors go on to explain why they issued an adverse opinion.
Note that the county chose to forgo the audit of Singing River, as they didn’t want to spend the money. The auditors make a recommendation and the supervisors respond with an action plan:
This cycle has repeated itself for the last few years. The auditors recommend that the supervisors audit Singing River and other “component units,” the supervisors send a letter saying they will do the audits on Singing River et al.., the audits are never completed, the auditor makes the same notes the next year.