Key Takeaways
- Government finance teams are facing a compounding staffing crisis driven by retirements, uncompetitive salaries, and rising workload complexity.
- Understaffed or undertrained teams increase the risk of financial errors, audit findings, and burnout — which only deepens the shortage.
- Governments are responding with technology modernization, cross-training, and proactive fiscal planning.
- External advisory support can fill critical gaps in specialized areas like GASB compliance, Uniform Guidance, and year-end close — without the cost of a full-time hire.
If you’re a finance director, city auditor, or school treasurer in Ohio right now, you already know the feeling. The workload isn’t slowing down — but the team carrying it keeps getting smaller.
This isn’t a temporary staffing blip. It’s a structural shift, and local governments across the state are wrestling with how to keep financial operations running when the bench is thin and the demands keep growing.
The Pressure Points Are Stacking Up
The accounting talent pipeline has been narrowing for years. Fewer graduates are entering public accounting, and those who do often follow private-sector salaries that government entities simply can’t match. At the same time, a generation of experienced finance professionals heading for the exits — and they’re taking decades of institutional knowledge with them.
What’s left is a difficult equation: newer staff with steeper learning curves, legacy systems that resist efficiency, and workloads that haven’t shrunk to accommodate any of it. When someone leaves, the remaining team absorbs more. Burnout rises. More people leave. The cycle is hard to break.
The complexity of the work itself isn’t helping. Reporting requirements, compliance obligations, and audit expectations have grown significantly. Finance leaders who should be focused on strategic planning find themselves pulled back into tactical work just to keep the lights on.
What Forward-Thinking Governments Are Doing
There’s no single fix, but the governments managing this well tend to share a few approaches.
Modernizing financial systems. Manual processes are a capacity drain. Automating high-volume, low-judgment tasks — account reconciliations, routine reporting, data entry — frees up staff time for work that actually requires judgment. Technology isn’t a cure-all, but it can meaningfully reduce the administrative burden on already-stretched teams.
Investing in cross-training. When knowledge lives in one person’s head, that person’s absence creates a crisis. Governments that cross-train staff across systems and responsibilities build resilience. It’s a longer-term investment, but it’s one of the most effective safeguards against institutional knowledge walking out the door.
Shifting from reactive to proactive planning. Teams that are always in crisis mode never get ahead of the workload. Prioritizing long-term fiscal sustainability planning — rather than lurching from budget cycle to budget cycle — reduces the kind of last-minute, high-pressure work that accelerates burnout.
Bringing in outside support strategically. This doesn’t mean outsourcing everything. It means being intentional about where external advisors add the most value: filling technical gaps that are genuinely hard to hire for, providing surge capacity during peak periods, and bringing specialized knowledge that smaller departments can’t reasonably maintain in-house.
Why This Matters More Than It Might Seem
It’s tempting to treat staffing shortages as an HR problem. But the downstream risks are operational and financial. Understaffed or undertrained finance teams are more likely to produce reporting errors, miss compliance deadlines, and generate audit findings — findings that carry real consequences for funding, reputation, and public trust.
And the trajectory isn’t improving on its own. Staffing shortages in government finance are expected to worsen over the next several years as the retirement wave continues. Waiting for the labor market to self-correct isn’t a strategy.
Where Rea Comes In
Rea works with municipal and county governments, charter and community schools, and state agencies across Ohio. We understand the specific compliance landscape these teams navigate — GASB standards, Uniform Guidance (UG), Ohio audit requirements — and we know how to provide support that fits the way government finance actually works.
That looks different depending on what your team needs. It might be financial statement preparation and year-end close support when your team is at capacity. It might be helping your department evaluate and transition to a more efficient financial system. Or it might be providing the specialized technical depth — GASB, — that’s genuinely difficult to keep current on when your team is stretched thin.
Government finance leaders are managing real risk right now. Our advisors are here to help carry some of that weight.
Ready to talk through what your team needs? Connect with Rea’s government advisors or reach out directly to start the conversation.
About the Author
Leigha Moran, CPA is a Government Audit Manager at Rea’s Newark office. With 10 years of experience in governmental audit, Leigha specializes in government accounting and auditing, serving municipal, school and state agency clients across Ohio. She brings a deep understanding of the compliance, reporting, and operational challenges facing public-sector finance teams today.
