Valley Stream School District Failed To Monitor Assets, Comptroller’s Audit Finds

VALLEY STREAM, NY. — The Valley Stream Central High School district failed to properly monitor, account for and dispose of capital assets with a total combined value of $732,516, an audit published by the state comptroller’s office finds.

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office announced a slate of audits Monday, including an audit of the Valley Stream district’s handling of capital assets between Jul. 1, 2022 and Jan. 31, 2024. Those capital assets, the comptroller’s report said, are defined as items with a useful lifespan of longer than one year from their purchase date; things like buildings, machinery, vehicles, furniture, computer equipment and software were listed as examples in the report. In the 2023-24 fiscal year, the comptroller said, the district held 1,376 such assets, with a total value of $3.2 million.

Central to the audit was the examination of a board of education purchasing policy, which the comptroller’s office said had been passed in 2001, requiring everything over $1,000 in value to be inventoried with the assistant superintendent keeping a complete, current, perpetual inventory thereof. Additionally, the comptroller’s office said, the 2001 policy required that the district’s purchasing department must record assets at the time of their purchase, notifying the proper parties about their purchase, receipt and identification requirements.

Also under scrutiny was the board's asset disposal policy, which the comptroller’s office said tasked building administrators and support staff supervisors with identifying obsolete or surplus equipment that could no longer be salvaged or used. According to the audit report, the board authorized the district's assistant superintendent to reassign assets throughout the district or store them for future use, also authorizing the assistant superintendent to sell off those assets to local municipalities, nonprofit organizations or in public, or to discard them in the safest, least expensive manner possible.

Upon completion of the audit, the comptroller’s office said district officials had failed to ensure that procedures implemented by the board of education were being followed, allowing for missing and inaccurate information to make its way into the district’s inventory system, assets to go missing, and assets to be disposed of improperly.

First among the audit’s findings was that the assistant superintendent did not properly record and tag 382 assets purchased between Jul. 1, 2022 and Jan. 31, 2024, leaving $178,123 worth of assets without proper inventory records, leaving the district at, "an increased risk that its assets could be lost, stolen or misused," the report said.

In a Nov. 12 letter acknowledging the district’s receipt of the audit, however, superintendent Dr. Wayne Loper said that those items cost an average of $466, below both the board’s $1,000 threshold for inventory requirement and an additional reporting threshold that the district had established requiring the inventory of items above $500 in value. Furthermore, Loper said that the 382 items referenced were actually 731 items, due to a pair of invoices being recorded as four items worth $2,364.69 each when they were actually made up of 327 items, including copper wires, chargers and cables.

Second among the findings was that key information was not properly recorded on the inventory reports for 81 assets totaling $455,096 in value. Of those items, “10 assets totaling $276,686 had missing or incorrect model numbers, including seven assets totaling $268,621 with incorrect model numbers and three assets totaling $8,065 that did not have a model number listed,” the comptroller’s report said. “For example, the model number on an oven costing $10,000 did not match the model number documented in the inventory record, and the model numbers for two school buses, each costing $120,879, were not documented in the inventory record.”

With regards to those incomplete or incorrect items, Loper wrote in his Nov. 12 letter to the comptroller, “the district will strengthen documentation protocols to ensure that all required data fields, particularly make and model fields, are accurately completed.”

Third among the findings was a survey of 60 items, with a total value of $456,594, of which the comptroller’s office said 37 of the assets were either impossible to confirm as the assets listed on the inventory reports or missing altogether. Among the 18 missing items, the comptroller's office said, were four freezers, total value $11,128; three color laser printers, total value $10,697; three pieces of office furniture, total value $9,014; one $3,870 volleyball net; a $2,763 bass trombone; two handheld radios, total value $2,610; a $2,250 centrifugal juicer; a $1,426 laptop; a $1,298 flute and a $1,249 point-of-sale terminal. In total, the missing items are worth $46,305, the comptroller's office said.

In his response to the audit, Loper said the district had been able to find 12 of the 18 items, worth over $31,572.74 cumulatively.

“Moving forward, the district will improve the accuracy of location data and emphasize to staff the importance of reporting asset locations promptly,” Loper wrote.

Finally, the audit found district officials unable to provide “any supporting documentation indicating that the Board approved the disposal of 29 assets with replacement costs totaling $85,400 that were identified as disposed of in the inventory report.”

“For nine of the assets with replacement costs totaling $51,000 (two ovens, two refrigerators, an automotive computerized brake lathe, a plow, a food slicer, an automotive engine diagnostic scanner and a server rack), the Director told us that the disposal dates on the inventory report were not correct because some of the assets are still in the District’s possession,” the report reads.

The remaining 20 assets were electronic devices, of which 11 had been sold to a data destruction company for cleaning, the comptroller's office said. According to the audit report, district officials were able to provide the comptroller’s office with an April 2024, certificate that the data stored on the items had been sanitized.

“However, the asset tag numbers for the 11 assets on the destruction report did not match the asset tag numbers in the District’s inventory record, and the inventory record did not include model numbers or serial numbers to confirm the identity of the assets,” the comptroller’s report reads. “District officials told us they used the date range they believed the assets were disposed of to find the disposal support and then matched the assets using the asset description and manufacturer name on the inventory record.”

Also among those 20 assets slated for disposal were five ethernet switches and a rack server, with total replacement costs of $10,600. Those assets, the audit report reads, were sold to an IT asset and recycling company in August of 2022.

“However, the six assets could not be linked to the asset list indicating that they were sold because various identifying information on the record documenting the assets as sold were different than the District’s inventory records,” the comptroller’s office said. “District officials told us they used the date range they believed the assets were disposed of to find support and matched the model number to determine whether the assets on the sale report were the assets identified as disposed of in the inventory report. Furthermore, although the contract with the company indicated that the assets would be sanitized, District officials could not provide any documentation verifying that sensitive and/or confidential information was removed from these devices.”

The final three disposed items included an unaccounted for pair of desktop computers, worth $1,800; the comptroller’s office said district officials could not determine how those two computers were disposed of.

In responding to those 29 disposals, Loper wrote in November, the district had conducted a physical inventory in June of 2023 and had been able to reconcile the disposals identified in the audit with the district’s own internal records. Those reconciled disposals, Loper said, had since been presented to the board of education for approval.

Loper closed his letter by saying that the district would submit a corrective action plan within 90 days, in accordance with municipal law. The full audit report, including Loper’s letter of response, can be found here.