School district hires new auditors

In the wake of the mistake that overpaid a handful of teachers hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Rockville Centre Board of Education voted last week to terminate its contracts with its former auditors and hired new ones.

The mistake was discovered just before the start of the current school year. Over the course of three years, the district wound up overpaying 44 staff members nearly $250,000. Though the overpayment was deemed a mistake by the district’s counsel, the Board of Education still made clear it was going to terminate its relationship with its internal and external auditors.

That decision was made official at the Board of Education meeting on April 21, when the board voted to terminate its contracts with Nawrocki Smith and R.S. Abrams & Company, LLP. The district entered into new contracts with Cullen & Danowski, LLP for internal audits and O’Connor Davies, LLP for external audits. There was no penalty to the district for terminating the contracts.

According to Superintendent Dr. William Johnson, the internal and external auditors serve different functions. The external auditors do an annual report looking at the district’s expenditures and revenues. The internal auditors get more in-depth and look at spending within various departments.

The cost for the district will most likely be the same, if not somewhat cheaper, for the new auditors. Assistant Superintendent for Business Robert Bartels said that the new external auditor is actually costing the district $4,000 less.

The internal auditor isn’t as clear. The district was paying slightly more than $29,000 annual to the old auditor. The new auditor is currently performing a risk assessment of the district, which costs $12,500. When the assessment is done, the district and the auditor will determine the cost of the rest of the work for the year. Bartels said that, based on what Cullen & Danowski charge other school districts, the cost is likely to be between $6,000 and $25,000 more.

“We might save a couple of thousand, or it might cost a couple of thousand more,” Bartels said. “But we’ll be in that same ballpark.”