OVER A MILLION OF S-VE TAX MONEY WAS SPENT WITHOUT PROPER AUTHORIZATION!

Top school district bureaucrats, in a Long Island school district, had stolen 8 million dollars from their school district. That triggered action from the state comptroller.

The comptroller sent his auditors to S-VE first. Our district stood out as a sore thumb because Superintendent Bailey left the district deep in debt after the cooking of the books, when our district had phantom assets in accounts receivables. The audit covered Tom Bailey’s last year as superintendent and assistant treasurer in our district. Below a small, unedited snippet of the 16 page report that the state comptroller published.

Report from the Office of the State Comptroller from December 2006:

“We reviewed 210 claims and for the 2004-05 fiscal year and found that the Claims Auditor, other District officials and the District personnel did not properly authorize 69 claims totaling $972,684. Also, we found that District personnel did not adequately support 58 claims totaling $64,800.  The 210 claims reviewed represented about 8 percent of all claims processed by the treasurer’s office. Of the 210 claims we revived, we found that:

·  Fifty-eight claims totaling $64,800 were not properly supported. Of the 58 claims reviewed, 35 totaling about $29,400 did not have at least one form of supporting documentation, such as purchase orders, expense vouchers, or approved conference request forms.  Eleven other claims for credit card charges, and travel and meal expenditures totaling $17,169 did not have any supporting documentation. This lack of supporting documentation did not allow us, and it would not have allowed the Claims Auditor, to determine whether the charges were for proper District purposes.

·  Twenty-seven claims totaling more then $915,00 were not approved by the Purchasing Agent or other district official, and the Claims Auditor did not audit them. Of these 27 claims, six claims totaling $807,900 were payments to BOCES for services that it provided to the District.

·  Thirty-four claims totaling $51,612 were approved by the Purchasing Agent or other District official, but were nor audited and approved for payment by the Claims Auditor. These 34 claims included three claims for roof/energy and parking lot improvements at the high school totaling $28.020, 24 claims for various cafeteria purchases totaling $4810. “

Above is about one page of the 16-page report. The comptroller stated that they had only looked at 8% of the claims. That resulted in exposing over a million dollars of unauthorized spending!!  What would have happened if they had looked into the remaining 92%?   How does the school board have the gall to come back year after year and ask for more and more money when enormous sums has been spent on heaven – knows what? 

The people do not know about the uncontrolled spending because the school bureaucrats keep it close to the vest and never publish it in their newsletters. You have no idea how much of your money is wasted.  It is time to vote out the board members who caused the mess.

THE COOKING OF THE BOOKS

     The auditing firm that checks the S-VE books reported to the board, in their 2004 auditing report, that $580,000 of assets that was in the books by the end of the 2003-04 school year must be written off because the money was not there.   They had phantom assets in the books.