Columbia Community Unit School District #4

Criteria: All grant fund expenditures should be posted to and accounted for in the general ledger accounts separate from other district expenditures. Condition: Wages that were paid with grant funds were not posted to separate grant general ledger accounts. Questioned Costs: None. Context: The majority of expenditures claimed within 25-4600 IDEA Pre-K and 25-4620 are payroll-related. The District has established subcodes to assist in tracking expenses paid out of IDEA grant funds (23 for IDEA Pre-K and 20 for IDEA Part B Passthrough). The District currently has two salary expenditure accounts that do not encompasses the total payroll claimed in the grants in FY25. The remaining employees are paid out of general fund payroll accounts, differentiated by grade & position. In the current fiscal year, IDEA salaries are paid out of Sp. Ed. K-1 Aide, Sp. Ed. 2-4 Aide, Sp. Ed. Teacher 9-12 Aide, Early Childhood Spec. Ed. Aide, Sub Teacher Salary, Pre-K Tuition Aide Salary, and RTI Aide Salary. These accounts co-mingle federal IDEA expenditures and non-IDEA expenditures. Per ISBE guidance, separate grant expenditure accounts should be established in an effort to separate grant expenditures from non-grant expenditures. Additionally, tracking the claimed payroll takes time and effort as any pay not billed to a grant account was indistinguishable from non-grant pay. Effect: Claiming payroll from different accounts that are co-mingled with non-federal expenditures presents difficulty in tracking expenditures billed to the IDEA program. This can result in potential mistatements if tracked incorrectly and misstatements could be liable for repayment. Cause: The Special Education Aide and Specialist accounts have been pre-established and are broken out to assist in tracking pay per grade and position. The District, in FY25, did try to utilize existing IDEA grant salary accounts. Establishing additional account codes would require significant modifications to the established payroll bill-codes. Recommendation: We recommend creating additional IDEA-coded grant accounts for the purposes of tracking payroll expenditures billed to the grant. The IDEA-coded account totals should ties off exactly to the ISBE reports, and this practice would allow the District to perform a more thorough review of the employee pay that is billed to the grant each quarter. We also recommend implementing a detailed grant tracking sheet (including separate employee pay detail) where expenditures per the general ledger detail are reconciled out to each ISBE report number. This would add an additional level of verification to ensure that ISBE numbers can be easily tied off to the numbers within the District accounting software. Management's Response: The District will consider the utilization of IDEA subcodes for the purposes of tracking pay billed to the grant. The District will consider implementing a detailed grant tracking sheet that ties off ISBE report numbers to the general ledger numbers.