Dorsey Provides Update on School System Audits

The Stephens County school system hopes to soon have at least one of its past due audits from state auditors.

School Superintendent Bryan Dorsey updated the Stephens County Board of Education on both the Fiscal Year 2014 and Fiscal Year 2015 audits at Tuesday’s school board meeting.

Dorsey said he does not expect it to take too much longer to at least get one of those audits completed.

“The FY14 audit, we should have back within the next few weeks and we have had the opening interviews for the ’15 audit and I would guess a couple of months before that one gets cycled out,” said Dorsey.

State auditors have pushed the timeline back on the Fiscal Year 2014 audit multiple times.

Originally, the school board was told the Fiscal Year 2014 audit would be ready last August, then state auditors pushed it back until last November because of a backlog and then in December, auditors told the school system it would not be until this year that the Fiscal Year 2014 audit would be completed.

Dorsey said he does not expect any surprises in either of the two audits that the state is working on.

“Well, we already knew that the ’14 and ’15 audits are going to have findings because, once again, the ’14 year was almost over prior to my arrival and we knew we were not going to be able to rectify everything through the ’15 year to be able to do that,” said Dorsey. “Once again, no surprises, we will have findings.”

Dorsey said that most of the areas where there will be findings in the Fiscal Year 2014 and 2015 audits will have already been addressed and corrected.

He went on to say he is proud of the work that the school system’s finance department has done in juggling the audits for Fiscal Years 2014 and 2015, along with closing out Fiscal Year 2016 and getting a budget ready for Fiscal Year 2017.

“All that has been tried to accomplish within the last 12 months of our new finance director and our new finance department,” said Dorsey. “What great efforts and resolve they have had to get all of that done.”

Dorsey said the goal is for the school system to have a clean audit for Fiscal Year 2016.