Cackle Fruit! Annacannatuna!

Remember that old 3 Stooges episode when the guys are making a "Bubble Gum" birthday cake at the drugstore...and they're shouting out ingredients?
"Cackle fruit! [Cackle Fruit]"
"And a can o' tuna! [Annacannatuna]"

That's kinda how we felt about the December Budget Adjustments.  You look at these documents and it's a mishmash. It's completely Greek.  Hell, we should be teaching Greek, not Mandarin Chinese.  It's like the Bloomin' Onion at Outback.  peel away layers and you just find more.  It's like Rube-icks Financial Cube.  But we digress...

On Monday January 23, the school board's Finance Committee met, and the major agenda item, which seemed innocuous enough at first glance, was "December Budget Adjustments.   But--as usual--there's more here than meets the eye.  And FAR MORE than was discussed in the situation report.  The situation report, prepared by Business Service Manager (and Deputy District Administrator) Phil Frei, said,

The General Fund (Fund 10) was increased by $20,000 due to an Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse (AODA) grant. A component of the December budget adjustments was transferring $84,074 from the Sun Prairie Education Association (SPEA) FTE budget into the workers' compensation budget. The workers' compensation budget needed to be increased due to an audit, by EMC Insurance, of payroll. All budget adjustments were routine in nature.
--- December Budget Adjustments Situation Report

The Situation Report also indicated that, "The Special Projects Fund (Fund 21, 23, 27, 29) was increased by $78,743 due to special education grants and donations." But let's not even discuss that. Let's focus entirely on the General Fund (Fund 10), the mainstay of the school district budget.

Seems pretty simple...right?  The district received an unanticipated grant for $20,000.  That would count as revenue.  It would then, of course, be offset by $20,000 of increased expenditures on the Expense side of the ledger.  Then we have the matter of needing to transfer $84,074 from the salaries line into the Worker's Comp. insurance line.  Gee...remember when we were told that due to "aggressive bidding", the district was able to achieve $150,000 in savings to the Workers Comp and other insurances budget?  Guess that just got cut in half, eh?  And how are we paying for this "oops"?  By transferring the equivalent of 1.8 FTE of available but as yet unfilled SPEA members.  Hmmm.

But let's look a little more closely at what transpired.  At then end of the day, the expenditures line of the budget increased by exactly $20,000 (or roughly 0.025% of the entire district budget).  The $84,074 is really immaterial because we just simply move the expense from one line to another.  So really it should amount to maybe splitting the $20,000 into a couple of budget lines, right?

WRONG!

What actually happened was:
50 different budget line items were adjusted.  50!
A total of $753,812 was shifted between line items in the budget.  That's nearly 40 times the total amount of the budget adjustment.
One specific line item was increased by a mere $80.  $80 dollars???!
22% of the budget line changes amounted to $1,000...or less!

What's going on here?
The school district doesn't like to be micro-managed, yet we're adjusting budget line items by as small as $80?
Does it really matter?  So one line item over spends by $80 and another is under spent by $80.

Clearly one of three things happened here.
A. This is yet another example of poor data coming out of the Business Service group.
B. We are witnessing first hand the Philly Shuffle as it applies to budgeting, or
C. Maybe this Situation Report was a tad less detailed than it should have been

The Most Alarming Part
If you follow the money (see Situation Report Attachment 3), the Business Administration function (Function code "25", or 250000) took the second largest hit, having their budget reduced by over $110,000.  When asked about this, Phil Frei responded that "I wasn't planning on spending that money anyway".
What...what....WHAT!???

On how reducing the Business Administration budget reduced by $110,000 would affect the district,
"I wasn't planning on spending that money anyway"
--Phil Frei, Deputy District Administrator & Business Services Manager

Really!  So...if you weren't planning on spending it...why was it in the budget in the first place?

This is precisely the lack of transparency and suspect accounting practices that continues to anger community residents.

We were hoping that the quality of data coming out of the district,m and overall transparency would improve.  So far, 2012 isn't look much better than 2011.

Look! Up in the sky! It's Cackle Fruit! 
 It's A Bloomin' Onion! 
 It's Rube-ick's Financial Cube! 
Naaaaahhh...It's just more of Sun Prairie's school district budget.