The District will retain an outside accounting firm to scrub the books of the city’s public schools, a first step in addressing myriad financial failures within the education system, D.C. leaders said Wednesday.
The yet-unnamed firm will be hired by the city government and schools “collectively,” Mayor Adrian Fenty said, suggesting a new era of collaboration between the two often-combative entities — at least for a short period. The public schools will be under Fenty’s thumb if Congress approves his takeover plan, which won D.C. Council sanction last week.
Fenty made the announcement after a 30-minute meeting at the John A. Wilson Building with Superintendent Clifford Janey, School Board President Robert Bobb, D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi and Ward 2 Council Member Jack Evans.
An independent audit of the District’s finances, released in January, revealed “a lack of internal controls” in the school system, specifically in the areas of procurement, personnel and Medicaid. The material weaknesses could be “catastrophic from a financial perspective” if not quickly eliminated, Gandhi said Wednesday, as the District’s credibility with Wall Street is at stake.
“What we have to do rightnow is focus like a laser beam on those things that were identified in the outside auditor report,” Bobb said.
Janey acknowledged it is time to “hire a firm to do much more quickly what we couldn’t do internally.”
The financial audit of the schools, Fenty said, is separate from a promised “forensic audit” of the education system, a top-to-bottom look at what works and what does not.
