A recent audit disclosed that Wicomico BOE needed to establish better controls over its inventory. Also saying that they have not performed a physical inventory for at least 3 years.
I'm told the BOE board is aware of this report and have joined the staff and auditors multiple times to review the recommendations.
In the last two years, prior to the Legislative audit, the board established an audit committee to ensure added financial accountability and procedural review.
The sub committee of the board meets directly with the outside auditors, Faw & Casson, and now Trice Geary, to discuss concerns and areas of focus for the annual audit.
An inventory audit, albeit non-exhaustive, is done annually as part of this audit, and the auditors and board determine sample size based on costs of performing the audit. The auditors randomly select items off the inventory list, go to that location and ask to see the item and compare serial numbers with the report.
I also understand that over the years, the board has considered the addition of an internal auditor, but due to cost (estimated at $50,000 + benefits) and lack of success the county had had with the hiring an internal auditor (as required by their charter), the BOE board has declined to add the full time position to the central office staff.
DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
The BOE is top heavy in adminisitration and always has been. If they need an auditor on board, why not eliminate one of the unneeded admin. positons and free that moneyup for the auditor pay and allowances. Thats really the only way to live within yourmeans! I agree, I believe thay need an auditor, either on board or hired.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you expect.Self control is bs to them.
ReplyDeleteGet rid of one of the public relations people which is reasonable since the job is enough for only one and only one works anyway. Get rid of the math coordinator or the math supervisor. Get rid of the reading coordinator or the reading supervisor. Get rid of some of the facilities titles that are so redundant they are ridiculous. Instead of adding positions, get rid of people who can't do the job they were hired to do. Another money saving move would be to reduce the number of people paid as directors which has become ludicrous in the last five years. Then there would be plenty of money for an auditor. Dr. Fredericksen said at one time that he thought there was much overlap in central office positions, but he has added more just as we knew he would.
ReplyDeleteHave you noticed too if a person does their duty as principal before they retire they are promoted to a job at the board of Ed...so when they do retire they retire at a higher level and draw more money. The board could get rid of those take home cars/insurance. We had to cut back on our cars to live within our budget.
ReplyDeleteI guess thier waste does not bother them. They are educated and out smart the dim wits we have for a council year after year. I thought we elected a pretty good council this go round. WOW was I wrong. They are arrogant. They do not care about the wellfare of this county. They have allowed the B.O.E. to roll over them again.
ReplyDeleteAs other county agencies take pay cuts. The B.O.E. got raises or steps.
As thier fellow county roads workers are the most underpaid workers in the region for the type of work they perform.
As deputies who work with them in the schools daily do not have a disability package.
You continue to suck the sytem for all that it is worth. The public does not know of the mass volumes of text books that have been purchased just to be stored away and never used because someone did not like the content. The computers stored like the stock room at Circuit City. Board members driving cars home. Hoiw many take home B.O.E. vehicles are out there and who drives them ??
Well the county council has chosen to take food off of the table of those who fight crime in our county.
Thats right 3% off the top. Not a big deal to some. It is the fact thay allow the B.O.E. over and over to hide funds and outsmart them.
WE ELECTED MENTAL MIDGETS. ALL OF THEM.
Cheries husband is B.O.E. I now know why she has screwed the Sheriff's Office budget. NO food coming off of her table.
Joe I intend to write a post that will consist of documentation and may be lenghty in nature. Should I mail or e-mail the documents to you. It will exspose major issues with county goverment.
TIME FOR A CLEAN SWEEP OF THE COUNCIL and Matt Craemer.
BOE will not cut one thing that affects the staff. They have used "it is for the kids" Bull Shit for years. Basically they have screwed public service, law enforcement, public works. Year in and year out.
ReplyDeleteTrips to the mountains to rejuveninate over the summer months. They are off correct??
So it is a vaction from your vaction.
Joe Hollaway attacks pens and deputies pensions. Come on Joe stop snow balling and go after those who use 65% of the counties overall budget.
There are people hanging arounf with 30 years on at the board. If you cant figure this one out. Why leave when you pull 100k plus a year, a car, vactions paid for by tax dollars be it state or fed.
Time to clean house.
I am a teacher. I am thankful to have a job and I try to do my best for the students of this county. I agree that there are cuts that could/should be made, but please don't paint us all with the same brush. It's very discouraging to those of us who try to do a good job to be disparaged over and over by the same public we try to serve.
ReplyDeleteDoes the BOE budget still include a clothing allowance for the Superintendent? I know it used to. Like the salary alone isn't enough to cover a few outfits!
ReplyDeleteI am sorry to all the teachers out there doing the job. I would never hold those responsible that take what they are given by the Board. I guess my frustration comes from years of horrible benefits. The County deputies have worked for years without a comprehensive insurance package. If injured in the line of duty or not you will not be able to survive on the benefits provided.
ReplyDeleteThe L.E.O.P.S. Pension package would have covered all the needs of Sheriff's Deputies. The sad thing is all the local counties minus Somerset *( The poorest county in the state) have this system now. It is by no mens the premier package,but does serve emergency services well.
An actuary was completed almost two years ago. The result was that the county would not have to pay in to the system for at least two and a half years. It was clearly a no brainer. The council chose to shun the needs of those that protect our children and streets of this county.
I fully intend to give the documentation to the media and present it at every public forum I can. The truth needs to come out. The taechers desrve evrything they get. Like at most goverments those at the top seem to be in great shape as those near the bottom suffer.
The public voted 73% in favor of better benefits for deputies in the last election and the council again ignored the public majority and the needs of the deputies.
If I were a teacher i would be thankful that you have an Exec. Staff that appears to be working for.
For the record Mike lewis and Rick Pollitt have supported this effort from the start. It is your county council that has refused to bend. In fact they have moved to take income from the deputies.
I know the same efforts to get over ten thousand signatures for question "A" will be made to removed those responsible for this lack of concern for a better working enviroment for law enforcement.
We have at least three deputies right now that could be in a bad position for staying in a system that does not support the welfare of their services.
Enough is enough.
See you at the Polls.
The biggest fraud is the ENP, Early Notification Program, where BOE employees get a 10% raise EACH YEAR for up to three years for saying when they MIGHT retire. It's called, "The bigwigs were retiring, they're in the new system, and they want to increase their pensions." Why was it a percentage of salary? So those paid the most got the most graft out of ENP. It's harder to find a math teacher or a special ed. teacher than an asst. supt. so why pay a percentage of salary to say when you might leave? Some stayed longer than what they had signed up for (no penalty) and some left earlier (no penalty). This was NOT asked for by the teachers' association, but proposed by the Board when those with the THREE highest salaries were retiring. Well, Mr. Field was the only honorable one of the lot. They knew money would be scarce but proposed it anyway. ENP should be investigated.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the county is having trouble hiring an internal auditor is not the reason the BOE doesn't hire one. They do not want to spend money on this position as it would only find problems rather than hide what management wants hidden...one being the "extras" buried in some of their salaries.
ReplyDeleteAs an outsider, it looks like there's a lot of BOE employees here that have a lot of insight as to where the waste of money is. In todayaxpayers are angry, and are looking for answeers's economic bust, it looks like we need to look into how 50-65% of our tax money is being spent. I don't care how ironlad this money is once it's in their hands; it is still our money, and we will spend it as we wish. We Taxpayers are angry, and are looking for answers.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't Norman Conway get paid by the BOE and for what? That would pay for an auditor.
ReplyDeleteAsk any of us at the central office and we will tell you the ones who do absolutely nothing. And some of the jobs need to be done but they are nowhere near being full time even though someone was hired as fulltime. Paying two public relations people is so one can continue to do next to nothing. You can get rid of the director of curriculum and let the directors of elementary and secondary do their own curriculum. It is stupid to have the two of them in the instruction department when they do nothing about instruction. Those are some places to get money that can be used for an internal auditor.
ReplyDeleteFor the record...Norman Conway does not get paid by the BOE. When he was an employee of the BOE, he received a partial salary from them...only for the days he worked and not in Annapolis. He was paid by the state for the days he worked in Annapolis. Nice try.
ReplyDeleteI agree that as many of you stated the admin departments do not seem to be affected by the budget cuts.
ReplyDeleteAs a local bus contractor we spent most of the summer waiting to find out what our pay scale was going to be this year. It was until the last week or so that we learned what it was going to be for the current school year.
They say they don't have enough money to help the contractors any but they can create more minimal bus runs all over the county that make absolutely no sense at all. Why not utilize the bus contracts that are already available. No those contractors just keep losing time and mileage to add more buses on the road.
We learned recently that they (the transportation dept) wanted to start paying us by what the CPI (Consumer Price Index) was. As stated in an August 28th Daily Times story the Pres. of the BOE stated that the county was losing money by the CPI so why would they want to pay their employees that way.
The BOE is supposedly trying to cut money anywhere they can but the Transportation dept recently had a job posting on the website for a contractual position in their department for the 2009-2010 school year. I have also seen a few new computer monitors in the office that are bigger than my television at home. They are continually trying to figure out ways to cut our bus contracts but don't seem to have the same ideas for their department. Just a few years ago there were only 3 or 4 people in the transportation department now they have doubled in employees and payroll and we certainly have not doubled in buses.
Seems to me that certain rules apply to certain departments at the BOE. I feel for the teachers and admin. staff at the schools along with the bus contractors and drivers who go above and beyond their duty to make sure the children get the best education possible because it seems they don't have the support they should be getting!
Ask anybody at the central office who has worked in one of the schools which setting is more stressful. There is no doubt about it that schools are the front line in everything but pay. Whoever said that family members of central office employees seem to get preferential treatment for jobs is 100% correct.
ReplyDeleteAs a teacher, I should get to hire "help" like the facilities department does. I would hire a coordinator of writing lesson plans, a liaison in charge of checking papers, a specialist to change bulletin boards and make copies of things, a coordinator II to meet with parents and attend committee meetings, a facilitator in charge of discipline, a supervisor in charge of giving tests, a foreman to teach, a manager to handle makeup work for absent students, etc. I have never seen a department add personnel like they do, but transportation is getting almost as bad. When you teach in this system, jobs get added to you almost weekly. If you work at the central office, staff gets added almost weekly.
ReplyDeleteWow great point about transportation dept. Desmond Hughes is married to none other than Cherie Sample Hughes. I think this mite be one connection to look at. Hughes used to be a dispatcher for law enforcement in Dorchster County. I can not believe he would not push his wife to help those in a field he was once in. Dorchester has L.E.O.P.S.
ReplyDeleteThere needs to be be an audit demanded by the public of the last ten years worth odf bull shit. The new gas rings will cost far more money then they will ever save. There are cameras evrywhere to watch those who never ripped the county off. Thanks to a couple of crimnals at the lanf fill the feeling of trust by council and county employee has forever changed.
There better be some headway shown soon by this council or they are all out. People are sick of the abuse. I am tired of wondering if my husband gets hurt at the Sheriff's Department what we will do to keep our home. To the rest of the wives we need to get together and start making some noise. I am broken hearted by all the crap my husband gets told year after year. To the teachers hang in there you do a great job as far as I am comcerned.
Thanks to Mr.Pollitt and Mike lewis for at least trying to get something done.
I agree that the gas rings & cameras will cost the county extra money!!! Although, this has to be implemented for an internal control measure. The landfill scandal was not only a disgrace to the public but also to the HONEST County employees! I guess everytime something goes wrong in the County thats the Landfills Fault!! Stop Beating a dead dog OVER & OVER!
ReplyDeleteblah
ReplyDelete