Feb
24
Yesterday came the disturbing news about Skiatook Public Schools spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more on janitorial supplies than necessary over the last four years. So today, let’s talk about what can be done to prevent another such incident or at least catch it faster.
For starters, there is a bill (SB 2034) authored by Senate President Pro Tem Glenn Coffee (R-Oklahoma City) which will have the State Auditor’s Office oversee the accounting firms that currently perform annual audits of school districts. The bill also requires that any firm performing an audit has at least one person with additional training in education audits every year. Right now, only 31 firms perform the audits for the hundreds of school districts in the state. And as we pointed out last year, there is nothing in the law that says the person doing the auditing cannot be related to a school board member or the superintendent. In fact, it would appear that the superintendent himself could do the audit if he was also a CPA with an office in Oklahoma.
Next, we need school districts to be far more transparent than they are. There are bills in both the House and the Senate that will make school district spending more accessible to the public by putting it in a searchable database on the State Department of Education’s website. It would include all expenditures of dollars whether from state, federal or local taxes. The more eyes we can have looking at spending, the greater the chance of finding funds being misused.
OFRG would like to each school district post their annual budget and audit results on their own website. Our Blueprint for Transparency review of school district websites found that 97% of districts in the state do not have their budgets online for taxpayers to see and 99% fail to post their audits. The documents already exist, all it takes is for someone to upload them to the website once a year. This is hardly a financial burden on school districts.
Finally, there needs to be more accountability on the local level. School board members are elected to represent taxpayers, not to act as a rubber stamp for a superintendent. Board members need to ask tough questions about spending and demand to see documents before approving any purchases. The State Auditor’s report says that a simple comparison of the billing invoices with the shipping invoices would have shown the discrepancy in the Skiatook case. School board members should trust, but verify.
And let’s not forget about us taxpayers. We need to be accountable for electing school board members who will take the time to oversee the spending of our tax dollars. And we need to follow-up and ask questions ourselves if board members are not doing their job. Schools are spending the majority of our tax dollars so they need to be answering our questions. If they don’t, take action!
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3 Responses to “Skiatook incident shows need for school audit reforms”
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You forgot about legislation I’ve filed regarding TRANSPARENCY for School Districts. Please see Senate Bill 1633, the School District Transparency Act. It is working its way through the process as we speak!
GAO-07-162G Government Auditing Standards
3.07, and I qoute: “Auditors participating on an audit assignment must be free from personal impairments of auditors to independence. Personal impairments of auditors result from relationships or beliefs that might cause auditors to limit the extent of injury, limit disclosure, or weaken or slant audit findings in any way. Individual auditors should notify the appropriate officials within their audit organizations if they have any personal impairments of individual auditors include, but are not limited to, the following:
a. immediate family or close family member who is a director or officer of the audited entity, or, as an employee of the audited entity, is in a position to exert direct and significant influence over the entity or the program under audit;”
You are really really misinformed and refuse (apparently) to do your own research! The next time you decide to open your mouth you might want to consult a real “subject matter expert” in regards. It’s covered bud-covered with all kinds of accounting regulations. They can’t be an employee of the district, kin, or anything of the sort.
[...] the time that the State Auditor’s report was released, we’ve talked about how the ultimate authority rests with the school board which is supposed to be the voice of the taxpayer. Board members need to have an active role in running the district and not just be a rubber stamp [...]