Be more careful with public's money

The problems that prompted the Baker School Board this month to toughen policies governing employees' use of credit cards are not egregious.

The school district's auditors didn't find evidence that district employees had embezzled money or committed fraud.

Yet the auditors' report bothered us nonetheless.

It should bother everyone whose taxes help to pay the monthly bills for those credit cards.

The auditors' findings show that some district employees — including their highest-ranking member, Superintendent Don Ulrey — don't always handle the public's money with quite the reverence those dollars deserve.

Which isn't to say any of those employees — Ulrey included — intentionally squandered tax dollars for their personal benefit. We don't believe that's the case.

What employees did do, more than than two dozen times during the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2007, is charge expenses to district credit cards without turning in detailed receipts or without having received permission from a supervisor to use the card (or, in several cases, without doing either). District policy required employees to complete both steps — and that mandate was in effect even before the school board approved the more stringent rules earlier this month.

That two dozen figure probably is not the complete tally, either, because auditors checked some, but not all, credit card receipts from the previous fiscal year.

Auditors also found two cases in which Ulrey improperly used a credit card to make personal purchases. Ulrey reimbursed the district for both purchases. He said that in one of those cases he accidentally grabbed the district credit card, which looks similar to his personal card, from his wallet.

That's a reasonable explanation. Except there should be no need for such an explanation, because district employees should never carry a district credit card in their wallet.

What truly troubles us about the auditors' findings is that they give a glimpse into a work environment where employees don't seem to treat every tax dollar as a precious commodity, and that the money does not belong to them.

Fortunately in this case, the system designed to highlight such problems worked — auditors discovered discrepancies and the school board instituted policies that require, among other things, that employees who use a credit card carry a notebook in which they can keep receipts and other required paperwork.

According to the auditors, the school district had to pay $236.86 in interest last fiscal year because employees failed to turn in receipts on time, forcing the district to carry forward credit card balances rather than paying the bills in full each month as district policy requires.

In a school district with an annual budget that exceeds $17 million, $236.86 is not much money.

But to many of the people whose taxes make up part of those millions, that sum is quite more than pocket change.