Nearly $2 Million Worth of TUSD Fixed Assets Missing in One Year

by David Safier

(TASL) It’s amazing what you can learn when you attend an open meeting of a TUSD committee. Thursday I was the sole observer at the Tucson School Board’s Audit Committee meeting. Here’s what I found out:

• About $2 million in Fixed Assets — items whose value is somewhere between $500-1000 or higher — went missing from various sites — read, schools — around the district last year.

• The number of items missing varied wildly from school to school. One high school reported something like 500 of these high value items were missing. Another high school reported 6.

• For the past 17 years, this issue has not been looked at carefully by the District. The losses have been reported, then basically filed away.

• It’s unclear where the buck stopped, so to speak. The inventory lists came in to Asset Management, but whether A.M. sat on them, or whether they were reported to higher authorities and nothing was done, cannot be known unless the District looks into the matter.

The losses were discussed in the outside District Management Audit which was finished earlier this year and got a lot of press for getting the figures on the savings for school closures completely wrong. The Fixed Asset Management section begins on page 3-59. The missing items were mainly electronics stuff — computers, cameras, camcorders, projectors, etc. — though one Gator Tractor, 4×2, valued at $5,228, was listed.

According to the Audit Committee, the total value of the District’s fixed assets items is about $74 million, which means we’re talking about something in the order of a 2.5% loss. I don’t know how that ranks, whether it is high or low for school districts in general. But I do know if there are huge discrepancies between the number of items lost at different schools, that should immediately send up a red flag, and someone should figure out what’s going on. Maybe there’s a good reason why some schools appear to lose more items than others, but ignoring the problem won’t answer the troubling questions.

The TUSD Board meets today, Friday, to review the outside audit at 3:30pm in the Badger Room, Tucson Magnet High School, 400 S. Second Ave. The Audit Committee said it plans to submit a report about these fixed assets issues to the Board, but I don’t know if the report will be in the Board’s hands or if that item is on the agenda.

(Conflicted Emotions Disclosure below the fold.)

Conflicted Emotions Disclosure: As a confirmed tax-and-spend liberal, it pains me to give aid and comfort to the tax haters who will conclude from this post, “I knew it all along, those bastards are wasting my tax money. Not a penny more for Tucson Schools until they get their house in order!”

However, the “Spend” part of “tax-and-spend” refers to spending with a wise and generous hand. There’s nothing wise about wasting money through sloppy inventories or shrugging one’s shoulders if expensive items regularly turn up missing. That’s just wasteful. At the very least, it needs to be looked into. If there is a problem, it needs to be corrected so District funds are directed toward helping its students.

Ever since I came to Tucson 5 years ago, I’ve heard nothing but bad things about TUSD’s bloated, inefficient administration and the lack of good financial accounting and oversight. I’ve always filed those complaints away without comment, because I had no hard evidence, and complaints about school districts’ inefficiency are so common, they’re often little more than background noise. But the information I’ve gotten recently has come from more and more credible sources, and it is based on increasingly solid evidence. So when I hear a Board-appointed committee, mainly made up of informed citizens (an accountant, an econ prof, a CPA and a lawyer, to name some of the members), expressing concern about this kind of waste, I have to report it, whether it makes me happy or not.

However — and this is a huge HOWEVER — I do not join the “Not a penny more until they get their house in order” crowd. First, a certain amount of loss and inefficiency is part of any organization’s normal functioning. I’ll go so far as to say that the most inefficient thing any organization can do is demand 100% efficiency. And problems in TUSD do not mean that money is being wasted right and left. In this case, we’re talking a about 2.5% loss. Maybe it should be more like 1.5%, I don’t know. But it’s ridiculous to say, “If the District gets a $20 million dollar infusion of cash, it’ll just be wasted.” Some of it may be wasted, but the vast majority will be used to better the quality of education for the students. Let’s do everything we can to cut the waste, but let’s not deny our students the education they need and deserve in the process.