Audit: Monroe over paid an employee by $2,000

Monroe Local Schools received a finding for recovery after a state audit found an employee being overpaid and assets posted incorrectly.

The audit was for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017 and was publicly released this week.

The audit finding discovered a special education teacher’s aide was overpaid $105 every two weeks in her paychecks from Sept. 2, 2016 through June 23, 2017 for a total of $2,310.

On June 22, the district changed the coding of expenditures in the Special Education Fund in the amount of $10,070 to the General Fund. Therefore, the $2,010 in over payments from the Special Education Fund was effectively re-coded to the General Fund.

The employee’s contract was approved May 22, 2016 at an hourly rate of $17.96, but was paid $19.96 an hour due to data input error, according to the audit.

School officials and the employee signed an agreement for repayment of $30 from 77 paychecks, beginning last month.

The state auditor’s office said the district should review compensation for employees and verify that payments are made in accordance with contracts. Failure to do so could result in over payments in future years going undetected and resulting in findings for recovery in subsequent audits.

School officials told the state auditor’s office the over payment happened when the new contracts were uploaded into the district’s payroll system for fiscal year 2017. When the district entered the contracts for fiscal year 2018, the error was discovered when the new calculation showed a decrease in salary and should have implemented a re-payment plan immediately, according to the audit.

District Treasurer Holly Cahall said it was during a time of staff changeover and the payroll specialist at the time had less than three months of training.

“We made a mistake,” she said. “It was very unfortunate.”

A significant deficiency was also noted on the audit after the district discovered errors on how some Chromeboook laptop computers were posted. An error was found after it was found that multiple computers were posted as one record.

Cahall said this was another training issue during staff changeover that was corrected.

“We expect to have a perfect audit this year,” she said.

After being in fiscal emergency from 2012 to 2014, Monroe has had clean audits before this audit.

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