The Auditor's Office acts as the General Accounting Office for the City of New Bedford. It's main responsibilities are monitoring the City's expenses and revenues, preparing City records for the annual City Audit, assisting the Mayor's Office in preparing the annual budget and processing City Payroll and life insurance.

The City operates under a decentralized accounting approach, whereby individual City departments are responsible for a majority of their purchasing, accounts payable and accounts receivable activities. Given this decentralized system, the Auditor's Office also provides training to the staffs of other departments so as to improve City accounting records by standardizing the way in which bills are processed and by the way internal departmental books are kept.

Public information requests of a financial nature, even if specific to an individual department, should be directed to the Auditor's Office so that responses are tied to the books of the office, which is the official record of the city.