Senate Bill 6323 and House Bill 2538 represent bad public policy and should be amended to strike the language restricting state financial and performance audits of school districts.
The legislation would tie the hands of an independent state agency that helps ensure that school districts are spending taxpayer dollars properly.
In these difficult economic times, citizens and legislators should want public accountability to be a higher priority – not a lesser one.
In a strongly worded letter last week to Gov. Chris Gregoire, state Auditor Brian Sonntag urged the governor to withdraw her support of the legislation.
“It compromises our Office’s independence and flies in the face of citizen and policymaker demands for accountability and ever-dwindling public resources,” Sonntag said in his letter.
Sonntag is spot on. The role his office plays in uncovering financial irregularities and sloppy bookkeeping practices that lead to fraud in the public sector is essential.
True, no one likes to be audited. But if a school district or local government is doing its job, it has no reason to fear an audit.
In practice, the state Auditor’s Office uses a risk-based approach in deciding the frequency of school district audits.
More than one-third of the state’s 295 school districts are audited every three years. They happen to be the smallest school districts in the state.
Meanwhile, two-thirds of the school districts are required to receive audits every year because they receive $500,000 or more per year in federal funding.
So the bill would have no effect on the 200 school districts whose audit schedule is dictated by the federal government.
That leaves the smaller districts, which are already on a three-year cycle.
Seems as if the bill tackles a problem that doesn’t exist.
The bills, which are designed to drive down school district costs, would give the school districts too much control over when they are audited. Fiscal and performance audits would occur at the request of the local school board or if fraud or irregular conduct is suspected of school district personnel.
As long as the state Auditor’s Office adheres to an even-handed audit schedule with cost-containing measures in place, the public is better served under the existing approach to public school audits.
It was just a little over a year ago that state auditors found that the Seattle School District paid $280,000 for services it didn’t receive. In addition, auditors found that the school district spent $1.5 million for services that didn’t benefit the district or could have been handled by district employees at considerable savings.
For the record, the school district requested the audit after it found evidence of possible fraud in its now defunct Regional Small Business Development Program.
The audit investigation led to felony charges against a former Seattle Public Schools manager and two of his nondistrict cohorts.
Big school districts with big budgets and staffs aren’t the only ones vulnerable to fraud. Keep the state Auditor’s Office in its independent role, auditing large and small school districts alike.
