Orange County School District Sitting on $58M Reserve Fund

A state audit found that the school district has overestimated it's budget by millions of dollars over the last five years.

Auditors from the state's Comptroller's Office found that the board appropriated $27 million of fund balance in the District budgets for the last five years; however, only $1.4 million was used.

For the 2016-17 fiscal year, the school district's budget was $173,481,266. The school district had a year end fund balance of $58,868,105.60.

The Comptroller's Office compared the budgeted appropriations to actual expenditures for 2012-13 through 2016-17 and found that District officials overestimated appropriations by over $43 million.

The Comptroller's Office recommends that the district stop adopting budgets that appropriate fund balance that is not needed to fund operations.

The audit also found that financial reports were not provided to all board members. Only four of the nine board members recieved reports regularly.

This is a result of the district's audit committee that currently receives and reviews the financial reports that should be reviewed and approved by the Board as a whole, thereby preventing five of the nine Board members from performing their duties.

The district must now provide financial report to all board members.

See the full report for more details, and the response from the superintendant of schools

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