MIAMI.- Since 2011, members of the Miami-Dade School Board have not been audited, nor is the way in which their respective offices spend the allocated funds monitored. This was the shocking finding of the recent meeting when discussing recommendations to avoid irregularities that came to light after the arrest of former member Lubby Navarro, accused of embezzling more than $100,000 of public money.
Last week, State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle announced Navarro’s arrest as a result of an investigation alleging that the former board member had misappropriated public money by using the P-Card and Travel Card in her possession for personal gain. . She shopped at Walmart, Office Depot, TJ Max, Brandsmart, Home Depot and traveled with family and friends to the Dominican Republic and Las Vegas.
Although this was the first meeting since Navarro’s arrest and it appeared to pass in an orderly manner, everyone was waiting for the case of the former board member who is awaiting trial to be addressed. How could it happen that for a year a member of the school legislative body could allegedly misuse public money without the alerts being raised?
Part of the answer came to light when President Mari Tere Rojas invited to discuss agenda item H-2, in which the superintendent and the chief auditor are recommended to support any additional audit on P-Cards and Cards. of Travel in the possession of each member of the Board for expenses related to their functions. That’s when the chief auditor, Jon Goodman, noted that Since 2011, neither the members of the School Board nor the superintendent have been audited.
Goodman made it clear that they conduct very rigorous audits of the district’s nearly 360 schools. However, they do not do the same with purchases and expenses of school board members.
Danny Espino, from District 5, intervened, saying that “it was shocking that our expenses are not audited.”
“We do not apply the rigor that we demand of schools when they have to make purchases,” said Espino.
District 1 Representative Dr. Steven Gallon III focused attention on one idea: “There were no audits” and recommended auditing all Board members since 2019. “We have to go backwards in order to move forward.”
Gallon recommended that the audit be external, “it should not be someone subordinate to us.”
For her part, Monica Calucci from District 8, said that the “elephant is in the room”, we have to see it immediately because the public’s trust in us is affected. “To restore it, we need to show accountability and transparency.”
Gallon went further by recommending that current and former Board members and any years not audited be audited.
Finally, the Board approved all the recommendations, in addition to preparing an annual report on the 2023-24 audit, on P-Cards and travel cards. Include annual procedures and audits of the Board members’ offices and the superintendent’s office, by an external agency. Take corrective action, including quarterly reviews of procedures governing the use of P-Cards and travel cards.
“You trust but you verify,” said Superintendent José Dotres to explain the process that must be implemented by the school district.
M-DCPS is the third largest school district in the country with more than 40,000 employees and 330,000 students attending approximately 360 campuses. Its budget is almost 8 billion dollars.
(email protected)
@menendezpryce
