Former general manager of Wyong Shire Council, and the new general manager of the Central Coast Council, Rob Noble. And now on the Central Coast, the council formed from the merger of Gosford and Wyong has identified a $1.39 billion over-valuation of assets, as well as inadequate security around the accounts themselves. Central Coast Council, which has referred its findings to the Independent Commission Against Corruption and other agencies, will hold a residents' forum on Monday ahead of an extraordinary general meeting to adopt a report into the former Gosford Council's finances. The position prepared by Central Coast Council, under the control of administrator Ian Reynolds, is that the former council made a number of major accounting errors that have to be changed. The new council says it has to write down the value of $1.39 billion of the former Gosford council's assets – mostly roads and earthworks, and water infrastructure – to comply with accounting standards. Some of the wrongly valued assets, the new council said, reflected practices dating back seven to eight years.

Local Government Minister Gabrielle Upton says the government remains committed to the remaining mergers, which have been delayed due to legal action. But other incorrect valuations of road assets were made in 2014-15, said the chief executive of Central Coast Council, Rob Noble. "The basis for doing the calculations just didn't look right to my financial people so they've delved deeper and compared with the asset value methodologies used by other local governments in NSW," Mr Noble said. "The valuations were nothing like those." Central Coast Council also said it had identified "significant weaknesses" in IT and other controls. These weaknesses potentially allowed "a limited number of officers and software vendors" to make changes to council financial tables "without any effective control reporting or audit trail". "I've worked in local government since 1978 – I've never seen anything moderately, minutely, approaching the scale of this," said Mr Noble. "It's really quite alarming," he said.

The lack of security controls around the finances mean that "we don't have confidence in the accuracy of the income and expenditure figures that the accounts were showing," Mr Noble said. Mr Noble said the new council had referred the matters to "more than one" external agency. The Local Government Minister, Gabrielle Upton, said one of those was ICAC, and that the referral was "significant". "It further underlines the important work administrators are playing in improving local government in NSW," said Ms Upton. One former Gosford councillor, Vicki Scott, said she would be interested in what was said at the public meeting to discuss the issue.

"My biggest issue with that council was that there was not enough reporting that came back to us," said Ms Scott. There had been a difficult relationship between some staff and councillors in the former Wyong and Gosford councils for years leading up to the forced merger. Gosford Council had resisted a merger, and Mr Noble conceded that when the merger happened "most of the executives on the new Central Coast council came from Wyong". But he said he did not reflect a "Wyong-centric" view, having only joined the council on an initial six-month contract after a long career in local government.