Roxbury Central School District Selected Financial Activities - Introduction

Background

The Roxbury Central School District (District) is located in the Towns of Roxbury and Middletown in Delaware County and the Town of Gilboa in Schoharie 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 is one school in operation within the District, with approximately 365 students and 91 employees. The District’s budgeted expenditures for the 2006-07 fiscal year are approximately $8.7 million, funded primarily with State aid, real property taxes and grants.

The District Treasurer (Treasurer) is the chief accounting officer of the District and is responsible for maintaining the District’s books of account as well as performing all banking functions. These include making bank deposits, bank transfers, journal entries, and signing checks. The Treasurer is responsible for the custody, receipt and disbursement of District moneys under the general supervision of the Superintendent.

The District’s financial data software is installed on the computers used by the Treasurer, accounts payable clerk, payroll clerk, and Superintendent. The Treasurer has administrator rights¹ to the financial data software, and for security purposes, each user has a unique account and password. The District’s Information Technology (IT)² staff person manually backs up the financial data daily.

Objective

The objective of our audit was to determine if the Board adequately safeguarded District assets. Our audit addressed the following related questions:

• Did the Treasurer properly account for all District moneys?
  
  
• Did the Board segregate the duties of the Treasurer or implement other compensating controls?
  
  
• Did the Board establish policies and procedures addressing IT access rights and establish plans to protect equipment and data from potential disasters?

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: cash receipts and disbursements, purchasing, payroll and personal services, capital assets and consumable inventories. 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 risks existed in the Treasurer’s office and the security of the District’s IT system. We therefore examined these areas for the period July 1, 2005 to January 3, 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 and Corrective Action

The results of our audit and recommendations have been discussed with District officials and their comments, which appear in Appendix A, have been considered in preparing this report. District officials generally agreed with our recommendations and indicated they planned to initiate corrective action.

The Board has the responsibility to initiate corrective action. Pursuant to Section 35 of the General Municipal Law, Section 2116-a (3)(c) of the Education Law and Section 170.12 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education, the Board must approve a corrective action plan that addresses the findings in this report, forward the plan to our office within 90 days, forward a copy of the plan to the Commissioner of Education and make the plan available for public review in the District Clerk’s office. For guidance in preparing the plan of action, the Board should refer to applicable sections in the publication issued by the Office of the State Comptroller entitled Local Government Management Guide.
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¹ Administrator rights grant a user sufficient access rights to allow them to manage the access rights of other users and carry out other high-level computer management tasks.
² Information Technology can be defined as the development, installation, and implementation of computer systems and applications.

Complete Audit in PDF