Dallas County School Board’s audit habits follow a disturbing pattern

by Jeff Melcher

DALLAS — NOTE: Documents discussed and not explicitly linked in the story can be downloaded in a single Zip file.

The Dallas County Schools (DCS) are holding a Board of Trustees meeting today.

This little-followed body controls about $67 million in public funds. Two trustees are running this May for "at large" seats.

The DCS is having some kind of financial reporting problem that is not getting much public attention. The minutes of their meetings for the past several years show it is taking longer and longer to finish their annual audit. The DCS minutes of January 2006 approved the audit for fiscal year ending August 2005. But meeting of June 2007 considered the audit of the year ending 2006. The audit for 2006 was not voted out as approved until August 9th of 2007. This is a full calendar year after the close of the fiscal year.

So the audit for 2006 was approved about 10 months late. There is no notation in the record about why it was late. It confirms that the fiscal year ended Aug 06. It’s dated May of 2007. So the 2006 audit was about four months overdue from the CPAs and took another three months to grind through the board.

A Google search finds no acts of professional journalism committed regarding this matter. Even though it paralleled the similar problems of Lancaster ISD, happening at the same time. (I confess I was also distracted by the drama in Lancaster to the point I paid no attention to the larger budget of DCS.)

The audit for 2005-06 as published appears to be incomplete. In this case the archived document ends at page 11. The top page makes reference, at least, to pages 37 and 38. There is no table of contents to indicate the total number of pages. There are none of the expected annexes “C-1”, etc, usually seen in district compliance audit reports.

The audit for the next fiscal year, ending August of 207, was not approved until the meeting of January 2009 (PDF link).

The audit doc is here (PDF link). The CPAs (Weaver and Tidwell) signed it on Jan 27, 2009. It covers the fiscal year ending August 31, 2007.

The DCS board is also apparently attempting to follow Lancaster ISD practice in voting out ex-post-facto amendments to the budget -- changing the financial plan AFTER the money is already spent and the books are already closed. The agenda of the October, 2008 board meeting indicates that the DCS board was post-facto amending the 2007-2008 budget (the sixth of the fiscal year’s amendments). The minutes confirm that.

The 2007-2008 budget (PDF link) was approved 30 Aug 2007.

It ran for one year and must therefore have closed out the fiscal year in August 2008. However, agenda item (5.a) for October 2008, from this, shows a problem / amendment:

In November of 2008 the DCS proposed creating a new position of internal auditor. That position has not yet been filled. For DCS the auditor reports once a year to the board. The superintendent, not the board, drafts the annual appraisal / evaluation for the auditor and the board then revises or approves.

Dallas County taxpayers contribute about $7 million directly to the DCS via local property taxes.

Today's meeting agenda is here.

This story was submitted by a member of the Pegasus News community. Jeff has regularly covered the Lancaster ISD.