Posted on 01/12/2015 5:49:27 AM PST by TurboZamboni
Minneapolis Public School employees are using district credit cards for unauthorized purchases — including personal use — and have routinely failed to follow expense policies, a Star Tribune review of school expense records found.
Several school district leaders — including the outgoing superintendent and the current CEO — repaid the district for expenses only after the Star Tribune inquired about them.
The Star Tribune reviewed $1.5 million in credit card expenses submitted by 262 employees over the past six months.
School officials spent thousands of dollars at grocery stores, Target, Wal-Mart and restaurants in Minneapolis and around the country. The chief executive’s secretary spent $2,000 framing high school sweatshirts for a conference room. The secretary of the district’s human resources director charged $1,000 for balloons for several days of job fairs.
While it is not completely clear how many of the expenses are questionable, a sample of 270 expense reports showed nearly half were submitted with no supporting receipts. Some transactions for more $1,000 included no receipts. District policies require receipts for every expense.
Evidence of questionable spending or sloppy financial record keeping on expenses by Minneapolis school officials is arising at a time when the district is facing a budget shortfall in excess of $5 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
“Keeping receipts is HARD.”
Especially if you never had them.
These jokers at the district are apparently running around skimming like crazy.
Take a closer look at the school employees in Minneapolis.
They’re joined at the hip with state government bow wows...
” sloppy financial record keeping on expenses “
Any time you see this phrase, it is theft. Remember, all this stuff is self-documenting. You don’t get reimbursed without the paperwork.
I remember working with a guy who tried to get reimbursed for a $300 pair of shoes. The company had co-signed for the card because the guy had repos on his record. The company ended up eating the balance when he left.
Kitkat is right, but also ...fine. Don’t keep up with them. Just don’t get reimbursed. easy!
In my experience, public school administrators rarely if ever are held accountable for anything: job performance, expenses, even actually being in the building during school hours. Their salary is at minimum triple that of a teacher and they are accountable only to themselves. A school board member called into Garage Logic and told them that at his MN School Board Association training he was told that the job of a board member is to support the Superintendent. I thought the board was the entity to which the Superintendent was accountable, but that is not the case.
Looks like the government has found another way to help our wonderful public servant teachers — give them credit cards for “school” purposes but then don’t monitor their usage. Courtesy of the district taxpayers!!!
According to the article, it was all administrators and their staff, not teachers.
The answer to this problem is to support conservative school board candidates or get involved and run for the position yourself. Get active and find out what’s happening.
Yes they will try to bamboozle the school board member into believing they have to rubber stamp the superintendent and his administration, but it is really the other way around. They are elected by the people and their job is keep an eye on the school district and its policies.
I have seen school board members elected with less than 100 registered voters voting in the election. Bad things happen when nobody is overseeing or caring what is happening in the district - usually the teachers, students, and tax payers suffer.
Oh, and scrutinize the bond elections that always seem to cover the continual improvements for athletics and other non-essentials rather than the improved education of the students.
Real easy, but will never happen. Fire anyone who does not have proper paper work for stealing from the district.
Not only will nobody be fired, they’ll all hide from the public courtesy ‘data privacy’ laws passed by their democrat protectorate legistlators.
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