The State Auditor has released the results of a special investigation into the North Linn PTO.
Auditor Rob Sand says they identified concerns about how former secretary Danielle Arnold handle the funds she was responsible for. He says she failed to deposit around $26,000 in collections that came in and there were a couple of thousand dollars of expenses that were not authorized.
Teachers became concerned when the balances reported by Arnold did not match what they expected. Sand says the money came from various activities. “It was money that was coming in for PTO fundraisers, and so it would have been a lot of cash payments, things that we were able to measure, things that people would have been purchasing or bidding on,” Sand says.
Sand says his office made several recommendations on how the school could prevent these issues. “We always ask public entities to be very careful with cash” according to Sand. “We need to have a lot more vigilance when it comes to segregation of duties with the public’s money to make sure that no one has the opportunity to commit theft of fraud.”
Arnold resigned in June of last year. Copies of the report have been filed with the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, the Division of Criminal Investigation, the Linn County Attorney’s Office, and the Attorney General’s Office.