Education officials are asking the government to exempt the Public School System from a law that requires every government agency to share one percent of its total budget with the Office of the Public Auditor.<\/p>\n
“PSS should be allowed to keep that one percent for itself since we do our own audit,” Board of Education member Marja Lee Taitano said during a committee meeting Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Taitano said an official of the Attorney General’s Office has assured her that PSS could request for exemption from the budget-sharing requirement.<\/p>\n
The law, which provides this requirement, was designed to keep OPA totally independent from the Governor’s Office and the Legislature, and avoid a situation which would compromise the agency’s auditing activities.<\/p>\n
Education Commissioner Rita Inos and the board committee members have agreed to write to AGO and seek formal opinion on the possibility of PSS getting an exemption.<\/p>\n
Of PSS’ $37.7 million budget for FY 1999, $377,000 \u2014 which accounts for one percent \u2014 was not transmitted to the education agency as it found its way to OPA’s treasury.<\/p>\n
Taitano said the budget-sharing setup gives OPA advantages at the expense of school children.<\/p>\n
“OPA’s office is like a first-class suite, we need a first class suite for our children,” Taitano said.<\/p>\n
Inos said PSS doesn’t get the worth of money it gives to the auditing office because the education agency doesn’t get auditing service from OPA at all.<\/p>\n
Inos recalled an instance when PSS requested OPA to do an audit for the education agency’s financial balances. OPA responded with an eight-page letter denying its request, Inos said.<\/p>\n
“OPA said they’re too busy to do that,” Inos recalled.<\/p>\n
Bill Matson, PSS fiscal officer, said the education agency could have used the $377,000 to cover its personnel costs.<\/p>\n
“Since we were not allowed to use our personnel money, we have to accommodate those costs out of the operational funds,” Matson said. (MCM)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Education officials are asking the government to exempt the Public School System from a law that requires every government agency to share one percent of its total budget with the Office of the Public Auditor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}