PORT ANGELES — The Clallam County Treasurer’s Office has made a lot of changes in two years to make the public’s money more secure, Selinda Barkhuis, Clallam County treasurer, told about 40 members of the Port Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce at their weekly meeting.
Those alterations include increased cyber security and physical security of cash on hand, as well as better management and tracking of taxpayer funds, Barkhuis said during the meeting Monday at the Red Lion Hotel.
The Treasurer’s Office has six staff members and handles about $100 million each year, managing tax income and other funds for most taxing districts in Clallam County, except for Port Angeles, the Port of Port Angeles and Clallam County Hospital District 2.
Barkhuis was elected treasurer in 2011, and immediately was thrust into situations that made her uncomfortable.
“Part of my job was walking around with stacks of $20 bills,” she said of her duty of taking deposits to the bank.
Barkhuis said she noted the county already had an armored car service, so she added a cash transfer service from her office.
She also had to create an entire internal control system to track funds coming into the office and wrote an accounting manual for the office.
“When I got here, there were no written internal controls,” Barkhuis said.
An additional layer of security was added, with monthly balancing of the accounts with the Clallam County Auditor’s Office “down to the penny,” she said.
Another issue Barkhuis faced was cyber security.
“There is one thing that keeps me up at night. Cyber fraud,” Barkhuis said.
After a hospital district elsewhere in the state was hit by a keylogging virus, which revealed bank accounts to cyber thieves, Barkhuis said she designated a single set of the Treasurer’s Office computers for banking access only.
“There is no outside access to the county’s online bank accounts,” she said.
With those computers having only one use, there is less chance that such a virus, which records everything the person types and sends, can be accidentally downloaded or sent to a computer via an otherwise innocent-looking email, she said.
The office also recently trained for what to do in case of a disaster.
What would happen if there was a big earthquake, or a small one, or a major computer failure, or if there was a major fire in the Clallam County Courthouse and they couldn’t get in to the office to manage the daily funds, she asked.
If a bad influenza outbreak sent five of the six office staff home sick for more than a week, she said the staff was asked if the remaining person would know how to do the vital jobs each person takes care of daily.
She said that the office is creating lists of tasks, accounts and contact numbers so that if the computers go down, there is no connection to the Internet or if there is no access to the office, employees can still finish vital tasks to keep the county running during a disaster, she said.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsula
dailynews.com.
