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Audit Objective

Determine whether the Board and District officials effectively managed general fund balances.

Key Findings

• Unrestricted fund balance totaled approximately $2 million on June 30, 2018, or 58.6 percent of the ensuing year’s budgeted appropriations and exceeded the statutory limit by 54.6 to 73.4 percentage points from 2015-16 through 2017-18.
• The District’s budgeting practices included appropriating fund balance not needed to fund operations and adopting budgets that overestimated appropriations by a total of more than $911,000 (11 percent) from 2015-16 through 2017-18.
• District officials failed to take corrective action to our prior report that pointed out the excess accumulation of fund balance.

Key Recommendations

• Develop a plan to reduce the amount of unrestricted fund balance to the legal limit.
• Adopt realistic annual budgets based on historical or other known trends.

District officials disagreed with certain aspects of our findings and recommendations. Appendix B includes our comments on issues raised in the District’s response letter.