Results from a recent audit show that while the Mississippi Department of Education has made progress in its financial and contracting procedures, the agency still has work to do with the way it tracks federal grants.
At a State Board of Education meeting Thursday, representatives from accounting firm CliftonLarsenAllen presented findings from a June 30, 2017 audit of specific financials, as well as a single audit. The Minnesota-based firm conducted the audits on behalf of the State Auditor’s office.
In September, a scathing legislative report suggested that the department bid and spent improperly on numerous contracts for similar services. The report prompted State Auditor Stacey Pickering to heavily criticize the department for poor contracting procedures.
Pickering’s office also conducted a compliance audit and forensic audit of MDE — the compliance audit confirmed many of the conclusions produced from the legislative report. The forensic audit was ordered by the U.S. Department of Education because former state education officials mismanaged Title I and 21st Century Community Learning Center, or after school, funds in 2016.
As a result, MDE Chief of Operations Felicia Gavin told the board in October that the department enacted a series of contracting changes to improve operations.
On Thursday, principal accountant Bill Early told the board “while we did have findings, the number of findings was reduced from the previous year so progress has been made.”
Early said his firm’s audit of department financial reporting found the federal grant schedule was incorrectly prepared, meaning they were tracked as a group and not by individual grant, and some vendor payments were not recorded in the correct fiscal year, among other financial compliance matters.
After the CliftonLarsenAllen report, State Board of Education Chair Rosemary Aultman thanked Gavin for “pulling us out of a mess.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.