The Washougal School District lacked an effective process in place to properly monitor certain staff changes, according to a report put out on Thursday by the Washington State Auditor’s Office.
The audit was conducted for the time period of Sept. 1, 2015, through Aug. 31, 2016, and the issue flagged dealt with moving staffers around internally in the special education department.
Federal regulations require that recipients of federal funding establish and follow a system to ensure compliance with program requirements, one of which is documenting time and effort of staff through a semiannual certification. That way, federal officials can be sure the money is going where it was intended.
During that time period, the district didn’t provide those semiannual certifications for two employees in the special education department.
“The weakness is when we move staff around within funding, there wasn’t any process to highlight that those individuals had shifted from state funding to federal funding and alert the proper individuals to collect the semiannual certification,” Larry Mayfield, business services director for the district, said.
Mayfield said there wasn’t an existing process in place to catch the reclassification of staff from state to federal programs. He added that the district will create written documentation to catch those changes moving forward, and plans on having staffers trained on it by the end of the month.
The auditor’s office report said the new process will be reviewed during the district’s next audit.
Mayfield isn’t worried about the problem lingering once the new system is in place.
“There was no question about the legitimacy of costs,” he said. “This was just a procedural requirement that wasn’t followed.”
