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    Pennsylvania State Education Association President Rich Askey sent a letter to state Auditor General Timothy DeFoor urging him to rethink his decision about closing the school audit bureau in his department.

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    Letter to Auditor General Timothy DeFoor

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    Pennsylvania State Education Association President Rich Askey sent a letter to state Auditor General Timothy DeFoor urging him to rethink his decision about closing the school audit bureau in his department.

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    4K views2 pages

    Letter To Auditor General Timothy DeFoor

    Uploaded by

    PennLive
    Pennsylvania State Education Association President Rich Askey sent a letter to state Auditor General Timothy DeFoor urging him to rethink his decision about closing the school audit bureau in his department.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
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    of 2

    March 24, 2022

    The Honorable Timothy L. DeFoor


    Auditor General
    Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
    229 Finance Building
    Harrisburg, PA 17120

    Dear Auditor General DeFoor:

    On behalf of PSEA’s 178,000 members, I write to strongly encourage you to reconsider


    your decision to unilaterally end your department’s role auditing the expenditure of state
    funds and other activities of Pennsylvania’s public school entities, including school
    districts, intermediate units, charter and cyber charter schools, and career and technical
    schools. This irresponsible action will effectively end any organized, state-level audits of
    the commonwealth’s public schools on April 22, with no plan for any other state
    government department or agency to assume this critical function.

    We appreciate that the Auditor General’s office has sustained some state budget cuts over
    the years and that COVID-19 complicated an already challenging situation. However, in
    the enacted FY 2021-22 state budget and the proposed FY 2022-23 state budget,
    policymakers have sought to restore funding so your office can continue to carry out its
    responsibilities. Furthermore, if appropriate state funding were truly the key issue, you
    could have mentioned this during the recent budget hearings before the Senate and House
    Appropriations Committees. In your comments before the Senate Appropriations
    Committee, you referenced an internal “transformation process” when asked about charter
    school audits but gave no indication that you were considering eliminating your school
    audit function.

    If budget cuts and staffing challenges drove your decision to end these audits, the
    appropriations committee hearings would have been the appropriate place to notify
    lawmakers and stakeholders, so this could be addressed as part of the state budget process.

    Just as important, the idea that you can simply “transfer” these audit responsibilities to the
    Department of Education, without a thoughtful, jointly developed plan or strategy, is
    puzzling. As I am sure you know, the Department of Education lacks the staffing capacity
    to take on this long-term, large-scale project. It has no capacity or budget to absorb
    responsibility for the school audits that you are now refusing to perform.
    Finally, it is essential to consider that the commonwealth appropriates billions of dollars
    every year to public school entities and that public schools are now receiving several billion
    additional dollars in federal emergency COVID-19 assistance. Even though the
    professionals who manage the financial resources of Pennsylvania’s public schools are
    qualified and responsible stewards of this funding, the need to review the use of the
    taxpayer dollars their schools receive is fundamental to ensuring that the public has
    confidence in them and the decisions they make about how to spend public funds.

    Audits are an important part of this process. Unfortunately, you have decided to stop
    performing them. Unless you reverse your decision, it is unclear who will perform them,
    how they will be performed, or when, if ever, they will be done.

    Responsible governing requires forethought and planning. Your decision to end audits of
    public school entities shows evidence of neither.

    I encourage you to reconsider this decision as soon as possible.

    Sincerely,

    Rich Askey

    cc: The Honorable Patrick Browne, Chair, Senate Appropriations Committee


    The Honorable Vincent Hughes, Democratic Chair, Senate Appropriations
    Committee
    The Honorable Stan Saylor, Chair, House Appropriations Committee
    The Honorable Matthew Bradford, Democratic Chair, House
    Appropriations Committee

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