Davis taking measures to guard against fraud
Davis Superintendent Bryan Bowles said district officials have been taking precautionary steps since the FBI investigation began a year and a half ago, including creating a fraud hotline and requiring disclosures in conflict-of-interest statements.
Critics, meanwhile, say that if better practices had been in place earlier, the district would have been able to discover something was amiss more quickly.
Prosecutors say John and Susan Ross set up a shell company and sold pirated books back to the district at inflated prices. Susan Ross had been a longtime Title I director in the Davis district.
According to district leaders, the Davis district has been following state law and conducting yearly independent external and internal audits. The internal audit had initially alerted leaders that there was a problem nearly two years ago.
Since then, officials have limited access of employees to input new vendors into the computer system and beefed up the process for approving sole-source vendors.
Because the materials that the Rosses were selling to the district were of poor quality, Davis officials have established a periodic review of Title I materials to ensure they are high quality and in line with curriculum. The officials also placed control of Title I money in the hands of individual schools.
Davis officials now are working to fine-tune a hotline established to receive anonymous tips alerting auditors about suspected fraud.
Employees will also be required to sign a conflict-of-interest and ethics statement. And an employee can no longer solely approve and accept shipments from any vendor without the witness of another employee.
E-mail: terickson@desnews.com
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