Friday, September 7, 2012

Potential change in charging practices

Potential internal practice/policy change - this is open for a week long period of comment. Please pass along any comments on this to the business office. Specifically desired, are ways to improve this practice within the improvement parameters as set by the school board.

Potential change in practice:

As part of the annual audit cycle, the School Board reviews the financial information and district practices. One concern that is listed is segregation of duties and efficiency in payment practices. Noted is that a number of staff, or activity advisors, do not turn in documentation in a timely fashion so this slows the requisition and payment process down to a point that vendors are sometimes not paid within their expectations, and secondly that an excess amount of office staff time is utilized tracking down the missing documents. What complicates this even further, and demands more attention, are IRS and State rules that need to be abided by concerning tax free status and other obfuscating factors surrounding compliance.

Therefore, the Prairie du Chien Board of Education has determined that it is necessary that charging privileges be removed for individual employees who do not follow procedures within reasonable timeframes. Reasonable is to be defined as less than one week from purchase, unless there are extreme mitigating circumstances. Additionally, any purchases made prior to submission and full PO approval process not completed are subject to non-payment and/or responsible individual may be charged.

This involves any use of school credit cards for any local, vehicle fuel, or internet purchases. It further involves PO purchases or other vendor transactions using school accounts or school tax-free status.

Employees, or activity advisors, that are removed from the above mentioned uses, will have to make alternate arrangements for purchases including the probability of using their own credit cards or other means. Please note that those that do not use school accounts cannot be reimbursed for any taxes charged or use the school tax free status for purchases. For example, under this scenario, a teacher purchases materials for a school activity and submits the slip of $105 for reimbursement; only the $100 would be reimbursed as the $5 sales tax would not.

No comments:

Post a Comment