Background

The Haldane Central School District (District) is located in the towns of Philipstown and Putnam Valley in Putnam County and a small part of the town of Fishkill in Dutchess County. The District is governed by the Board of Education (Board) which comprises five elected members. The Board is responsible for the general management and control of the District’s financial and educational affairs. The Superintendent of Schools (Superintendent) is the chief executive officer of the District and is responsible, along with other administrative staff, for the day-to-day management of the District under the direction of the Board.

There are two schools in operation within the District, with approximately 890 students and 175 employees. The District’s budgeted expenditures for the 2006-07 fiscal year were $18 million, funded primarily with real property taxes, State aid, and grants.

Objective

The objective of our audit was to determine if controls over cash were appropriately designed and operating effectively. Our audit addressed the following question:

• Did District officials establish policies and procedures to provide reasonable assurance that cash transactions were properly initiated, accurately recorded, deposited timely and properly approved and documented?

Scope and Methodology

Our overall goal was to assess the adequacy of the internal controls put in place by officials to safeguard District assets. To accomplish this, we performed an initial assessment of the internal controls so that we could design our audit to focus on those areas most at risk. Our initial assessment included evaluations of the following areas: financial oversight, cash receipts and disbursements, purchasing, and payroll and personal services. Based on that evaluation, we determined that controls appeared to be adequate and limited risk existed in most of the financial areas we reviewed. We did determine that inherent risk existed in the cash control area and, therefore, we examined internal controls over cash for the period July 1, 2005 to April 12, 2007.

We conducted our audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards (GAGAS). More information on such standards and the methodology used in performing this audit are included in Appendix B of this report.

Comments of District Officials

The results of our audit have been discussed with District officials and their comments, which appear in Appendix A, have been considered in preparing this report.