 Alright, first of all I just want to introduce myself, Aliyah Weebelhaus. I am the business manager here at ESU 8 and I am joined by Tammy Schrader and Tanya Strom. They are administrative assistants here. She has been involved in this audit, especially with the federal grant that they audited pretty heavily and that is the math and science partnership. She worked as the assistant for our staff development department for several years while this grant was going on. So she was really the only person in our building at the time that had some of an understanding of that grant because our grant facilitator, Carol Jason, had retired in June. Tanya Strom, she is the special ed administrative assistant. So when it came down to the billing for the special ed department, as well as the activity and like our learning centers, she was really their go-to person. So they both were pretty heavily involved in the audit. We're going to start here just by looking at our poll results and it looks like there's a couple people in here that have had an audit before. I'm going to try to broadcast those results. And I know that several of you that are from ESUs, you know that we are all promised that we will be audited at some point in time and we were just lucky enough to get selected on a year where our administrator retired and several other key people in the unit. So it was an interesting audit to say the least. All right, we're going to go ahead and start. This is really going to be a Q&A kind of format. This is the only really slide that we're going to go over before we open it up for question and answers. And the process of it, I guess I kind of wanted to go over so you know what to expect when you are expecting a state audit. We received a letter in June and Randy was our administrator then and he pulled me into his office and said that I should go buy a lottery ticket because I was the luckiest person in the state of Nebraska and we had been chosen for the audit. And from about the middle of June until October 14th, there was really no contact from them. I had contacted them to set up a time for it and then we didn't hear anything until October 14th and then they sent out some requests of things that they wanted me to email to them that week and we went ahead and did that and by the 21st we had four of their auditors in our building. The four auditors came and they spent four 10-hour days here and they left on Fridays, which I don't know if you guys will agree, yes it was a nice welcome break from them. And they came in on that Monday and basically the first thing they did is they sat down with myself and Bill Moenkel, our new administrator and Jill Bates, our assistant administrator and we went through an entrance interview. And it was really kind of a quick just review of what we could expect from them and what they would be doing in this process. After we met with them, we then broke into like what I would call an individual interview session and each of the auditors kind of had their own specialty. One would focus on accounts receivable and accounts payable and our processes and our procedures on those and one was more payroll based and one was federal funds based. And what happened is I would meet, I met with the first one and then I just worked my way around the table all day for about six hours explaining our procedures. They really truly wanted to know how we did things so that they could just understand and wrap their head around the concept of why we are doing what we're doing. That took up the entire first day and then for the rest of the two weeks that they were here it was just constant documentation that needed to be provided and answer these questions and please come sit down with us for a bit or they would come in and visit you in your office and ask for more questions. They would give you a list of employees and you'd have to pull the documentation that they were requesting. And it was really time intensive I would say and I'm not going to lie it was a very overwhelming experience just because as you guys all know to give up two weeks of your time and to devote it to something that's not your regular job duties and know that that stuff is just piling up behind it, it is overwhelming. So that's something to just mentally be prepared with when you're going into an audit from the state auditor's office. When we got it all when we were all said and done the exit interview came up and when we sat through that that was I think probably the most enlightening part of the process it was nice to really see what everything that you were providing to them what they were doing with it and what they were taking out of it and they did go over at that time things that they thought would probably be a finding on your report but nothing was said in stone and at that point they also gave us the chance to respond to things that they found. So we could disagree or we could agree to disagree or we could say you know we don't feel this is right and we could have had them look further into laws statuettes whatever and and we did I mean we we listened very carefully we started to take away things that maybe we could change in our procedures and processes and Bill raised a good question with them where they question a way we were doing something and he cleared it up to them that the segregation of duties was there in this one particular case. They left they came in on the 21st and they left our building on I think it was the 31st of October and then it was at least the next week of heavy emails. I know I received I mean pretty much that whole next week was still dedicated to them through email. You two gals. I received math grant emails to pull out for them. So Tammy yeah she was still getting stuff Tanya where are you? So it was still pretty time intensive up to that point so don't feel like you're gonna have two weeks of an audit and it's done because that following week like I said I was still pretty much dedicated about 95% to them and just sending them follow-up spreadsheets paperwork whatever it may be and then I think I just answered my last email question to them on December 6th and we just got our draft of our final report today via email. So we don't even have our final report back yet. We have our draft so that we can look over and we have 10 days to respond to what they are saying or findings and then they'll go ahead and make it finalized and get it published for us. Before we open it up to questions I just want to say like that I really took it as a learning tool and I think that was the best way to look at it. That first day when we found out we were getting audited I don't know that I slept well but you know the next day we came back and I talked with Randy and we knew that this was really gonna be a tool for us to base some of the changes that we have been working towards anyways and we've had maybe staff resistance on some things and it really is the backbone to what we can use now to support our cause on some of these things. Tammy you have. I do want to say something. I want to let you guys know that these auditors were very pleasant to work with. They were very easy going, very accommodating, yes it took a lot of our time but they made it easy with their personalities. They were very nice people to work with. They were and we went in and we asked the questions. When we would go in and chat with them about maybe you know they would question something and we opened the door up and we would start to ask more questions about okay well how could we change this or what do you guys think that we should do and they were really good about giving us feedback and we've implemented several changes already and you know their suggestions for change were not bad by any means I mean do you guys agree like I feel like they were very fair. I don't think that they were anything out of the ordinary or difficult for us to change. Some of them were things that we expected. I mean there were things that we kind of figured would come up. I guess at this point we'll go into the findings a few of the things that really kind of popped out that we thought would be important to share with you guys. The first thing that we noticed and actually they told me in our interview or in the interview that I did that first day with them when I basically sat in there for six hours and answered each of their questions was they noticed right off the bat a lack of segregation of duties when it comes to our receipts, our payroll. I think those were the two major ones that they noted and the reason being was that I basically handled everything from start to finish on those things and yes I agree with them that does put us at more risk but they also understood we are not a large employer you know we have a staff of 111 we don't have the luxury of having three or four people complete a job duty. So we have taken some steps on the lack of segregation of duties for our receipts and they were suggestions from them Tammy do you want to walk them through that like what we have done now to change that procedure or that process I guess. Well initially Elia was doing everything on it well the one probably main thing we've changed is that I now process the deposits and get that all together so I open Elia's mail and I handle all the checks and the cash that comes in from the media center I create the deposit and then I bring it into Elia and she signs off approves it logs it into fund accounting right you know we do all the coding and then I take it to the bank so we've got we've got more than one person checking the deposits right their big thing was that having having myself open the mail and be the hands on the cash and also put together a deposit slip and put it into the software understandably so and easy workaround for us I mean it's really been smooth it's a you know way for us to double check each other and that's been a really easy adjustment so that's something we'll know that we've made made changes to our procedure on that. The other thing they had requested on the deposits was that we make daily deposits yeah they do and we were yeah and now we just we just make sure that we do them every day even if we just have a small one check we just still do it we just it doesn't take it doesn't take us that long yep and that's something we've we've done that was not a finding for them but it was just something that they reiterate to make sure we kept doing yep to everybody that everything stays daily the other part I guess first segregation of duties was on payroll again you know start to finish this process is pretty much me doing it and there's really not a lot that we can do to change how we're doing it or you know they didn't really say that we needed to split this up too much but what we need to do is when we're done processing that payroll and we have that payroll register it needs to go through multiple channels then and a big piece of that is having our administrator thoroughly look through that payroll register and Bill has done a great job of that for us and he said it's a great way for him to get to know everybody's name as well so he's done a great job of going through that payroll register and in particular since Tammy and I have access to creating the basically the employee profiles and creating the payroll deductions for employees he is going through and he is signing off on my payroll and her payroll in that journal or in that register in particular as well as the whole thing and they just stress that you're making sure that your administrator or if you are an administrator that you are thoroughly checking you're looking for vendors or an employee that maybe is not a familiar name you're making sure that sorry my computer is talking to me you're making sure that the there's nobody that has no deductions you know there shouldn't be an employee that has no state and federal deductions that you know big red flag and that piece of it we've implemented we're doing and we are just trying to split things up as much as we possibly can with the availability of staff here the next piece the was our activity and lunch account controls and I'll have Tanya talk to you a little bit about this this is our learning center accounts and they they talked to us in good detail about this and we've really made adjustments already so I'll let her take over from here and each of our learning centers we have an activity and a lunch account that they're fully responsible for their each month and they keep track of them and we had some problems on it we knew going into it we were they were going to find this and we had tried to take care of it in the front end so it wasn't a big finding to us or anything that we felt like we hadn't already addressed and we kind of just let them know that you know we had made changes there were a few things like checks to employees instead of them doing an expense sheet they were writing it to an employee not a huge deal there was the receipt there to support it nothing you know no bad findings just that we shouldn't do that it should be on the expense sheet there was some taxes paid on it when we shouldn't have or a tax exempt employer and then the biggest piece that they noted on it was the lack of control or the availability for there to be misuse of it because it wasn't being overseen as much as the other accounts and so we've fixed that by reporting in our board packet because there was no they're not doing purchase orders so they're not receiving permission upfront or anything like that to make these purchases so there does need to be some approval on the backside saying yeah those are all okay purchases you know understandable that there's things that come up that we have to pay for on the spot without approval but that the board does need to you know sign off on them to make sure that they're okay and I think that was yeah I think so we pretty much got I think that worked through and and we're head in the right direction with that one as well the other big one that I wanted to touch on here I guess I shouldn't say big one I don't I can honestly say that in our audit we don't feel like there was anything major like there were things we expected there were things we should change but I don't think there is Omaha World Herald front page news which is awesome so we were really pretty happy with that with those findings but the federal grant that they looked at the math and science partnership that's one really I think I think the issue here was that our our person that ran the grant was not available and Tammy who did such a great job of digging through piles and piles and piles of paperwork to find what they were looking for and I think for the most part everything was accounted for with the exception of the time and effort logs so I'll let you handle that right we did not have time and effort logs for the math grant and when you are when you are paying salaries clerical or grant director salaries out of a federal grant you need to be accountable for your time and effort logs that was something that Ali and I did not know since we have found that out we no longer have the math grant but if we ever do have a federal grant again we will we will know that the grant director needs to share the actual write-up on the grant with us so that there's more than one person that knows what the guidelines are and we also now know that you need to keep time and effort logs well and I we knew that I just don't know that we didn't know that it wasn't that it wasn't that we didn't have it right I think everybody had assumed that our grant director had done that right and she and she did have some stuff on her eye cow yes but I think they wanted a more detailed they didn't want to know that you just worked this day on the grant they wanted to know how many hours and what you did I was a little surprised that they didn't focus more on expense sheets I know some of the other audits that have been done they really looked at like you know the employee expense sheets and we they pulled a few and there was a couple real minor things on those but they didn't really focus on that they they focus primarily on just procedures oh yeah and and that is something we're looking at too is the mileage thing when it does come on an expense sheet and one of them was a federal grant expense sheet I think that we had trouble mapping out miles and having them make sense and they do give you I think it was a 10% leeway on your mileage and if you were within that range which 10% is pretty lenient if you were within that range then you were fine the problem we have is that there's several routes for you to go to different places here and people go back roads and you know what we looked at maybe possibly doing going forward is having a chart of miles to from this home base to this place is this many miles and that's what you expense and that would help in that case they also had problems where they kind of stopped someplace else in the middle and they didn't list that which they knew what they meant they went from Neely to Norford but they forgot to list that they stopped off in Battle Creek and then came back or someplace like that and so then we were over the miles so they just recommended that you put every stop you made on that so that they could put that into map quest is what they used when they did right yeah they did I wish we had vocal and I think if you have a microphone you can use the raise your hand option but we would like to get into a question answer part of this I think that would be a really beneficial part if you have something that you're wondering if you're doing it right we can tell you if it's something that they spoke with us about or looked at so if you have questions go ahead please start typing them in or if you just want to see you know did they focus on this go ahead and do that or you can do the raise your hand option as well we can try that if you've got a mic and and ESU 6 I'm so happy to hear that you have been selected for the next audit ESU 6 is thanks I I'm not sure that smiley face was supposed to be a winker but now it really is it was a good experience it was a great tool I'm actually extremely happy that it happened when it did it was perfect timing for us I've been in this position for two years and you know coming in you see things that maybe you want to change but you don't know if you should or you maybe don't have it's hard to get board this changes sometimes and this was a great tool it was also a great time with our administrator change you know it was built it was good for bill to come in and see where we had been and you know what the state auditor had to say about it and we did find out the more complicated you make things the less they ask questions yeah I spent about three days with them on the sped bill because they really really wanted to pick it apart but and I had everything to support it in the end some of it they didn't understand but they asked for very detailed information and luckily we had switched to doing that this year but ESU 6 asked if they prepared our financial statements as a part of this they did and they prepared it in the exact same format as our past auditor did I am guessing they asked you to have your auditor do it because we made them do ours to be honest when he gave me or he asked me to start basically filling out some of the financial statements I just flat out told them our auditor does this for us and my feeling on that is if we're gonna pay you $20,000 to come in and do our audit for us and tell us that we don't need to have our regular audit prepare our financials that you know that price tag is supposed to cover that they spent a lot of time I think actually preparing our financial statements and ours were particularly hard because we need to do more journal entries instead of expenditures and receipts in and out of some of our own funds and they had to sort through all that mess so we made them work for their money Connie was there maybe a minimum amount for the deposit or if only $50 should it make a daily deposit good question Connie you know they didn't really harp on it too much we do I mean we if we have a deposit we do it if it's possible if it's running close to time when the bank's gonna close it's not the end of the world if it sits till the next day you know I would just yeah I wouldn't hold stuff for a week you know but you I don't think you'll do one at least about every other day oh yeah you know try to every day but there's some days when I just have you know $5 from laminating from media I maybe necessarily don't try to really get that down there that day I wait till the next day till we have some checks come in and one thing with the deposits I want to touch on is that they did our media department has a lot of walk-in traffic people that deal with cash and that is something that they noted that we had I they had cash up in a drawer I think so we had to order a locked cash cash box and they have to bring back their deposits daily they can't hold on to that cash and they're not allowed to have more than $20 in that cash box again we felt a very minor we don't feel like our staff has you know ever taken any money out of it so that wasn't something that you know they found as a serious thing but we went ahead and implemented that change and again have had no problems with it any more questions before we start wrapping up okay well oh Connie's Connie's typing something here for us wait for these questions to come through I'm glad we've been helpful I I really want to tell all of you if you have questions going into this and you know I know ESU 6 you guys are waiting for that audit to start please call us or even if you're school yeah call us email us whatever if you're a school that just is wondering if this is how you know it's different it's your regular audit is so different than this day audit there's not even a comparison you know we don't have findings on our regular audits it's a lot more intense and they really they really do tell you you know hey this is a statute you need to be doing order this is a state law you know they like paper trails everything's got a match up yep especially on the grant staff I noticed yes you know hotel hotel bills with teachers names on it they matched them with the participants for that day to make sure that they were actually in attendance yes they did and they looked at you know if somebody was gone on a leave they would come in here and they would ask me on our attendance system show me the leave approval you know they do they they marry it up through your whole system so if you give them a procedure and you sit in that in that beginning interview you tell them this is your procedure you better make sure that you've got the trail to back it and we were able to do that you know it was time intensive but we were able to show them that yes this person was gone this day and they had a mileage expense for it and we also show that our their supervisor and their administrator approved it through our attendance enterprise system so they really did look at all those little details and Bill yes Bill commented the process was fair and good and it really was I can't I mean I wouldn't want them to come back next year I'm not gonna lie we've got plenty to take from this to work over the next year going forward but you know what it was it was a good audit it really was and it was a fair experience and they were very great people to work with Connie has a question Connie what about documentation agendas document mileage or conference costs yes they wanted those and that's something that we've we've really preached with our staff over the last two years so we had most of it you know they did pull an expense sheet that didn't have some agendas and they they're so easy to work with that they actually went online and started pulling the agendas for us so that we had the documentation so they really were not out to get us but we did also explain to them that we don't require agendas or meeting notes or whatever if it's within our boundaries so within our seven counties we only do it for the outside boundaries travel and they were perfectly fine with that so that was something that we did come up okay if there's no more questions or maybe Connie has one nope same thanks okay no more questions it is 415 or half hours up and remember this is recorded and we'll make sure that the link is posted on our website if you're not able to find it shoot me an email and I'll make sure that you get it or again please use us as a tool if you would like going forward we'd be more than happy to help you out in any way possible thank you everybody and have a great day thank you