Alabama's Deaf and Blind School Fails Financial Controls, Again

The Alabama Department of Examiners of Public Accounts⧉ -- the state's constitutional legislative-branch audit agency, which examines the books of every state agency and institution -- found that the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind (AIDB), a 150-year-old state institution in Talladega serving more than 31,000 deaf, blind, deaf-blind, and multi-disabled Alabamians, spent $264,966.68 in federal special-education money without the competitive bidding federal rules require, and, for the third audit in a row, failed to remit unclaimed employee paychecks to the state treasury.▸ Both are repeat problems: the questioned spending falls under a finding auditors rated a material weakness and material noncompliance, and the unremitted-paychecks finding is now three years old.

Under the Code of Alabama, an employee's paycheck that goes uncashed for more than a year is presumed abandoned property, and the employer must report and remit it to the State Treasurer's Office every November -- the same rule that protects any Alabamian's unclaimed wages.▸ Auditors found 106 AIDB payroll checks totaling $26,038.09⧉ were more than a year old as of June 30, 2025, and never made it into the Institute's unclaimed-property filing -- the same violation cited in FY2024 and FY2023⧉. In the earlier report, the flagged amount was $15,847.09 across 75 checks; two audits later, it's grown about 64% in dollars. AIDB's own corrective-action plan tells auditors the fix is done, naming Chief Financial Officer Mark Richenderfer as the contact -- but the remittance figure it reports, 54 checks totaling $8,361.37, covers about a third of the money the FY2025 audit actually flagged.

Federal grant rules (2 CFR Part 200, the Uniform Guidance that governs how states and their institutions spend federal award money) require any purchase above a $10,000 threshold to be shopped among an adequate number of sources before an agency signs a contract -- a rule meant to keep grant money, in this case federal special-education funding meant for disabled students, from being steered without competition.▸ Auditors found AIDB awarded three contracts worth $188,631.68 and bought $76,335.00 in visual aid equipment without doing that, and traced the whole $264,966.68 to a single federal award, A250254, part of the Special Education Cluster passed through the Alabama State Department of Education⧉ -- 62% of everything that award spent in fiscal year 2025.

The cause, per the audit: AIDB's written procurement policy still cites a state law section that stopped applying to the Institute after a 2021 statutory rewrite, so the policies actually in force never caught up to the rules AIDB was supposed to be following.▸ Management agreed the policy was outdated and said the fix -- updating it to reference current law -- "will be implemented immediately."

Two more findings describe an institution whose own books don't check out.▸ AIDB could not document $436,276.18 of the $1,235,860.15 in entries it restated to cash and net position, so auditors say they simply couldn't confirm those entries were accurate. Separately, AIDB's capital-asset subsidiary ledgers didn't match its general ledger by $1,905,598.55 -- mostly unrecorded capital purchases and software costs that should have been capitalized under governmental accounting rules but weren't. AIDB agreed with some pieces of that finding and disputed others; where it agreed, it says the fixes were already made by fiscal year-end.

None of this changed the auditors' bottom-line opinion -- AIDB's financial statements still received an unmodified ("clean") opinion for fiscal 2025 -- but it is the backdrop to a financial year in which AIDB's cash on hand fell about 61%, from $15,938,177 to $6,171,378, and its net position swung from a positive $593,123 to a negative $1,281,008.▸ AIDB attributes the swing mainly to a wave of legitimate capital spending, including work on a new 202-acre campus in Decatur; the audit's point is narrower -- that the accounting behind those numbers, not the spending itself, didn't hold up.