Gilbert Public Schools board gives OK to financial audit, questionnaire

By Tom Blodgett
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Twitter: @sp_blodgett

The Gilbert Public Schools Governing Board approved an audit and a compliance questionnaire at its March 28 business meeting. 

Both the Single Audit Reporting Package and the Uniform System of Financial Records compliance questionnaire were approved on unanimous roll-call votes, though the questionnaire received some scrutiny from board members. 

The Single Audit Reporting Package, which looks at two big federal funds for the district each year, had a finding of no significant deficiencies and no material weaknesses. This year, auditors examined the district’s nutrition funding and the Education Stabilization Grant. 

The questionnaire is a series of 170 yes or no questions on the “nitty gritty” of the district’s daily work, according to Finance Director Jackie Mattinen. The district had 15 “no” answers, or areas of non-compliance. Those came in accounting records, cash and revenue, student attendance, school district employee report and technology. 

That brought some questions from board members, but Mattinen said a no answer could come from a coding error or a deposit error that was made. One came, for example, when a deposit was accidentally entered into a spreadsheet on the wrong funding line, the kind of simple error that will occur over the course of a year, Associate Superintendent Bonnie Betz said. 

Mattinen said any serious problem would have risen to the level of a significant deficiency on the audit, but none did. 

“However, they all carry a heavy weight for us,” Mattinen said. “We take these very seriously. So we've already implemented some corrective action to make sure that some of these particular findings are not repeated.” 

A few errors that were repeated from the previous year came in student attendance, Mattinen said, where a no could be recorded for withdrawal notice not being submitted on time, for example. 

In response to the questionnaire, the district has implemented some new procedures to be considered best practices: financial processes being consistently reviewed and updated; expenditures and account coding compliance being reviewed monthly; student attendance training being offered several times during the year. 

Tom Blodgett
Senior News Editor | Gilbert
@sp_blodgett

tblodgett@iniusa.org

Meet Tom
Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.

Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.

Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism. 

Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.  

Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).