Audit Objective
Did Vertus Charter School (School) officials appropriately track, inventory and safeguard information technology (IT) assets acquired or in use during the audit period?
Audit Period
July 1, 2023 – January 16, 2025
Understanding the Program
Schools purchase a wide variety of IT equipment, such as desktop computers, as well as highly portable items, such as monitors, laptops and tablets and interactive displays. These assets can make up a significant portion of a school’s IT asset inventory, both in value and number. While officials were unable to provide the total cost of IT assets in use, the cost of IT assets purchased from July 1, 2023 through August 31, 2024 totaled approximately $222,000.
The Chief Operating Officer (COO) is responsible for overseeing the IT Department, including IT asset inventory management. The COO and IT Department staff are responsible for maintaining detailed inventory records.
Audit Summary
School officials did not appropriately track, inventory and safeguard IT assets acquired or in use during the audit period. Officials did not maintain complete, accurate and up-to-date inventory records to properly account for IT assets. Although the School Board (Board)-adopted financial policies and procedures manual (Policy) required the COO to ensure accurate inventory records were maintained to safeguard all assets, it did not provide detailed guidance for maintaining inventory records for most IT assets because the dollar amount of most IT assets do not individually meet the Policy’s inventory record-required threshold of $1,500 for fixed assets (including IT assets). In addition, the IT asset inventory was decentralized with multiple individuals and a service provider maintaining the inventory records which resulted in the records containing inconsistent information.
The School’s inventory records did not include all IT assets and none of the records contained adequate or Policy-required information to sufficiently track or identify the School’s IT assets. This was because the records were incomplete or included inaccurate information and did not contain certain asset-identifying information, such as an asset’s serial number, make and model, location, employee assigned, acquisition date, cost and disposal date. In addition, School officials did not conduct annual physical inventories of all IT assets.
The lack of adequate inventory records and comprehensive annual physical inventories exposes IT assets to loss, theft or misuse.
The report includes four recommendations that, if implemented, will improve the School’s IT asset management practices. School officials generally agreed with our recommendations and indicated they have initiated corrective action.
We conducted this audit pursuant to Article V, Section 1 of the State Constitution and the State Comptroller’s authority as set forth in Section 2854 of the New York State Education Law, as amended by Chapter 56 of the Laws of 2014. Our methodology and standards are included in Appendix C.
The Board has the responsibility to initiate corrective action. We encourage the Board to prepare a written corrective action plan (CAP) that addresses the recommendations in this report and forward it to our office within 90 days. For more information on preparing and filing your CAP, please refer to our brochure, Responding to an OSC Audit Report, which you received with the draft audit report. We encourage the Board to make the CAP available for public review.