WELLS - Early last month the New York State Comptroller's Office filed an audit review of Wells Central School District citing two problems the district had to fix.
While the Comptroller's Office offered two recommendations to fix the problems - which the district complied with - it ultimately found the problems involved minor clarification issues.
The first recommendation was that the school's claims auditor have a clear job description, and the school immediately acted on it. The Board of Education approved a job description at its March 21 meeting.
The second suggestion was the claims auditor should ensure all purchases should have proper authorization and be documented properly.
The report reviewed a sample of 40 claims from the spending period July 1, 2010, to Sept. 30, 2011, and found 36 errors totaling $48,633. The errors showed 14 claims totaling $16,488, lacked a purchasing order. Twelve more claims of $8,676 were approved for payment lacked the district official's signature.
That district official was Wells interim-Superintendent John Zeis, who said what happened was a result of some confusion by the internal auditor, and the school has since clarified such policies.
"We thought we had procedures in place that the internal auditor was following," Zeis said. "I think that there was some paperwork that was not kept that had to be kept."
The review reached the same conclusion citing "the lack of written Board-adopted policies, procedures and a job description" resulted in the mistakes.
"The state is right," Zeis said. "We have to keep all the paperwork to support what we do. The treasurer has been doing the same thing for years, but some of [the paperwork] got discarded. We have [since] told the treasurer to keep all the forms."