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Dallas ISD credit card fiasco

A reader brought this to our attention:

With little oversight, Dallas Independent School District employees swipe their district-issued credit cards hundreds of times a day, spending about $20 million a year on everything from office supplies and textbooks to meals and giveaway trinkets.

About 1,200 cards are in circulation, and they keep the district running. With them, administrators and teachers can buy day-to-day supplies without the hassle of waiting on a district purchase order. But rarely does anyone check up on the card users, review their receipts or question what they’ve bought.

They’re spending on items like this: a $200 blanket and pillow set from The Land of Nod, $1,700 in electric scooters, $200 in moisturizer from Bath and Body Works, and a $24.95 charge to an online dating service, Americansingles.com. The Dallas Morning News examined school district credit card transactions over 27 months, from January 2004 through March 2006 – a $41.5 million snapshot of district spending. Those and other district records showed that only a fraction of purchase receipts are scrutinized, and thousands of purchases run afoul of DISD policy and state purchasing laws. Among the findings:

• Card users were not required to submit their purchase receipts unless asked, and district administrators requested only a small percentage of them. In 2005, district auditors found: "The [district] does not scrutinize [purchase] logs and original receipts."

• Card users routinely buy at businesses that do not have price agreements with the district. One example: DISD has agreements with three companies that sell T-shirts, but this year credit card users spent at least $53,000 at other T-shirt shops, a violation of district purchasing contracts and state procurement laws.

• Card users often can’t document what they’ve bought. The News asked to review receipts for 226 purchases. The district was unable to provide receipts for 43 of them, or roughly 20 percent. In 2003, DISD auditors found similar problems. Under district rules, card users are supposed to keep all original receipts on file in case auditors need them. Those receipts are also public records and, by law, must not be destroyed.

• District auditors highlighted these weaknesses, and more, in two reports, but district officials failed to act on most of their recommendations. 

And according to this from 2005, the problem isn’t exactly recent.