. >> chairman: i would like to welcome controller ben rosenfeld. >> good morning.introduce it and hand the floor over to our external auditor. as you know, the city has two key financial documents that we prepare each year. the first, at the beginning of the year, the adopted budget, which is the plan on how the city is going to spend funds in the year ahead. at the close of the year, we close the books and produce financial statements that disclose the city's actual financial condition at the end of the fiscal year. to ensure that those documents are full, complete, and tested, the board of supervisors retains an external financial auditor that reviews them and other things and then reports to you on their findings. the goal is to ensure that there is a reasonable assurance that what we're representing in the comprehensive financial report is accurate. so what we have here today is the external auditor's reporting to you on their audit work for last fiscal year, the '17/'18 plan, and the cafer for the close that we're working through now. i'll say briefly as a bit