4/10/09

Columbus Dispatch

Jennifer Smith Richards 

State auditors say that because the Columbus school district still isn’t properly tracking its assets — items such as desks, chairs and cases of food — property initially valued at more than $800,000 was missing during fiscal 2008.

Much of the property is old, the district said, and has little value now. But Columbus City Schools continue to make progress in locating and documenting assets across nearly 130 schools and other buildings, Superintendent Gene Harris said.

A state audit released yesterday named seven significant problems in the district’s accounting, compared with 26 in fiscal 2007. The district has fully corrected eight of those previous issues.

“They have made improvements, and we inevitably have seen the results of those improvements,” said Emily K. Frazee, spokeswoman for state Auditor Mary Taylor. “When an audit has many issues, we look at those issues again during the next audit to see if they’re still remaining. Some things they’ve been able to really clean up.”

For example, the district purchased a computerized asset-tracking system in 2007 after previous audits criticized the district for losing track of millions of dollars in equipment. There are still some issues, including that workers aren’t consistently filling out forms when the district disposes of items.

“We are entrusted with public funds, and we take that responsibility very seriously,” said school board member Stephanie Groce, who oversees the district’s audit and accountability committee. She called the state audit “a substantial improvement” over ones from previous years.

Several of the auditors’ findings dealt with poor tracking of assets, including that the district’s food-services department wasn’t properly documenting its inventory. Quantities of 590 items worth $63,000 weren’t inventoried accurately, which led to the district misstating figures on financial forms. Inventories are being conducted monthly now, Harris said.

Two district employees were told to repay $510 as part of problems caused by infrequent updating of health-insurance records. The district had not been requiring employees to re-enroll or update their health-insurance information annually. As a result, some employees had ineligible family members on the insurance plan. One employee repaid $286 already. The district said it has begun updating employee information each year.

Auditors also found that:

• Money collected at high schools for things such as student activities wasn’t being deposited quickly enough.
• Sign-in logs for substitute teachers weren’t being used consistently, making it laborious to confirm that a sub actually had worked in a school.
• Federal grant money might have been spent in questionable ways.

As a general practice, the state doesn’t say that grant money was misspent, but it forwards questionable spending to the federal government.

State auditors said in this case that 15 district schools and two private schools that receive additional academic funding for poor students through Columbus overspent their allocations by a total of $127,921.

Also, the district charged $60,413 to the Reading First grant, which offers federal funds for teaching reading in early grades, outside the funding period. Auditors also questioned whether $838,000 in salaries was charged to the appropriate grants because there wasn’t proper documentation.