Auditors: NC education officials didn't review more than $300M in schools' stimulus plans
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is planning to hire more employees and contractors after an audit found the department wasn’t vetting whether schools’ plans for spending federal pandemic stimulus funds.
The department lacked the staff do so during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2021, and has since hired some workers.
As of March, Superintendent Catherine Truitt said the department was also hoping to fill remaining vacancies and contracting with audit firms so that DPI’s fiscal monitoring employees could focus only on their normal duties. The department has also approved of other monitoring plans and tools to guide fiscal monitoring employees’ work.
“The Department agrees that it was not able to complete the full scope of the initial fiscal monitoring plan by June 30, 2021,” Truitt wrote State Auditor Beth A. Wood on March 24. “This is due to lack of staffing resources, which is a challenge that is not unique to DPI, as a result of the world-wide COVID pandemic.”
The department struggled, in part, because billions of stimulus dollars came through the department, which at the time, had the same number of employees as it normally does. Federal funding for North Carolina schools typically totals only about $1 billion in a given year.
The department conducted compliance reviews for only 20 of 319 school districts’ and charter schools’ plans for spending stimulus money during the 2020-21 school year. That means 94% of plans to spend more than $300 million were not vetted to ensure that they complied with federal rules on the funds’ expense.
Wood’s office, in their report released Wednesday, found other errors in reporting on how much money was spent or received, resulting in underreporting and over reporting for about half of school systems and charter schools in 2020. Many reports were made months after deadline.
“When subaward information is not reported accurately or timely to the FSRS [Federal Subaward Reporting System], citizens do not have reliable information about how federal funds are being used in their communities,” Wood’s audit reads.
DPI officials say they’ve improved their monitoring and reporting processes. But they note that the U.S. Department of Education’s reporting system limits how many reports DPI can submit in a month. That ensures DPI cannot submit its reports on time, Truitt wrote. DPI has requested assistance from the federal education department to fix the issue.
Wood’s office announced two other reports for DPI on Wednesday.
A report on the department’s financial statements for fiscal 2021, released Wednesday, had no findings.
Another report assessed the department’s federal compliance for fiscal 2020. It’s not clear why that report, dated April 2021, was publicized Wednesday.
That report found other federal program monitoring issues, including late notice of award information and rules to school systems and charter schools that received and were spending Title I and other federal funds. Title I provides additional funding for schools with higher percentages of lower-income students.
