- January 28, 2026
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It’s been over three months since Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia claimed Manatee County overspent $112.4 million in fiscal year 2025.
However, the line-item audit that was promised by the state has not yet been delivered to Manatee County.
“We have the end of the math equation, but we have no idea what was included,” said Stephanie Garrison, director of Government Relations for the county. “If we knew what (the state) was starting with, we could probably work backward.”
Garrison said it’s unclear if constitutional officers (outside the Board of County Commissioners budget), such as the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office, were included in the state’s initial audit.
Garrison was speaking to the Manatee County Government Efficiency Liaison Committee at its monthly meeting Jan. 20, during which the committee requested a follow up letter be sent to Ingoglia’s office to request the report.
The East County Observer also reached out to the CFO’s office, but did not receive a response.
The liaison committee has a year to make its recommendations. The year will end on July 29.
“We can’t do our job until we see what the state is doing,” board member John Settineri said.
In the meantime, members of the liaison committee are poring over purchase card transactions, procurement contracts and interlocal agreements.
Because the committee is focused on finding wasteful spending, it requested staff from the Clerk of Court and Comptroller’s Office attend the January meeting.
The county's inspector general works under the clerk’s office and is responsible for taking complaints and investigating waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct.
Inspector General Lori Stephens said her office has conducted several purchase card audits. It’s an area that her office “stays on top of” by looking for certain markers, such as split purchases. County purchase cards have $5,000 limits, so the auditors will check to see if large purchases have been split between different employee cards or spread out among different days.
Neil Unruh, senior director of finance for the clerk’s office, noted that in addition to the audits performed internally by the clerk’s office, there is also an external audit performed each year.
He said that over the past 20 years, the external auditors have not identified any cases of broad waste or abuse. However, he did put one item on the committee’s “radar” — arbitrage expenses, which are paid to the Internal Revenue Service when a government or nonprofit profits from the interest on a municipal bond.
“We got hit with a pretty substantial arbitrage penalty recently — over $500,000 of which should not have happened,” Unruh said. “That’s all related to timing and how you can spend your bond money, so those are the things that we consider as unnecessary to have occurred. If you don’t spend your bond money fast enough, you’re going to get hit with arbitrage penalties."
Manatee County wrote a check for $525,505 to the IRS in April 2025 for a yield reduction payment (the amount of excess earnings over what is allowable) plus interest. An interest payment of $13,584 was included because the payment was overdue.
The money was bonded in 2019 — $48.59 million for transportation projects and $8.66 million for energy efficient projects.
Commissioner George Kruse said the check was not paid using taxpayer dollars, and the bonds were not spent in a timely manner because of COVID lockdowns that stopped all work a year after the bonds were issued.
The bonds were “parked” in an investment account in the interim, and the account earned too much interest in a 3-year period. Because municipal bonds offer lower rates, there are limits to how much interest they can earn. Anything over the allowable amount has to be paid back.
Jan Brewer, the deputy director of finance for the clerk’s office, anticipates another arbitrage payment is yet to come.
“It’s very hard, with as much debt as the county has issued and is sitting on, to move it and get it spent the way it should be,” Brewer said.
