CT Auditors Flag the Same SDE Failures for 22 Years

A statutory audit by Connecticut's Auditors of Public Accounts⧉ -- the legislature's independent audit office, which examines every state agency under Section 2-90 of the General Statutes -- disclosed 15 problems at the State Department of Education (SDE) for the fiscal years ended June 30, 2023 and 2024, seven of them repeated from the prior audit.▸ SDE is the administrative arm that runs Connecticut's preschool-through-adult education system and moved $3,125,660,376 through its General Fund alone in fiscal 2024. The oldest of the 15 findings -- a failure to reconcile teacher-certification revenue against the state's own books -- has now been repeated in ten consecutive audit reports spanning 22 years.

SDE's Talent Office Bureau of Certification collects fees every time it issues a teacher, administrator, or coaching certificate, tracking those fees in its own Connecticut Educator Certification System (CECS).▸ State rules require the department to periodically compare that system against Core-CT, the state's official accounting ledger, to make sure the money collected matches the money recorded. Auditors found SDE has never built that comparison: for fiscal 2023 the two systems disagreed by $4,894, and for fiscal 2024 they disagreed by $18,884, even as the certification bureau issued 23,890 and 28,576 certificates and collected roughly $3.03 million and $3.34 million in fees those years. The audit's own conclusion is blunt about why: "SDE management failed to address this condition for over 20 years." The department told auditors it agrees only in part, and that a newly available detailed report from the certification system might finally let it reconcile going forward.

Connecticut's State Property Control Manual requires every agency to physically count its equipment each year and reconcile that count against the CO-59, the standard state property-inventory form agencies file with the Comptroller.▸ SDE has not done a complete count since the fiscal year ended June 30, 2015 -- a gap the auditors' own effect statement ties directly to risk: "there is less assurance that the department secured and accounted for its assets, leaving state property susceptible to loss, theft, or fraud." In the meantime, the CO-59 balance SDE reported to the Comptroller fell from $15,882,982 in fiscal 2023 to $11,683,382 in fiscal 2024 -- a $4.2 million swing that, absent any physical count behind either number, cannot be distinguished from a bookkeeping change. In its written response, SDE attributed the lapse to staffing challenges and told auditors it plans to complete a full physical inventory within six months of the audit's June 4, 2026 issuance.

A parallel finding covers software: SDE reported $9,698,200 in capitalized software and $193,187 in other intangible assets on its fiscal 2024 property form but could not produce a complete software inventory and had not conducted an annual count of its licenses either.

SDE is required by various statutes and public acts to file dozens of reports a year that let the legislature and executive branch oversee its programs.▸ Reviewing all 77 such reports due during the audited period, auditors found SDE had no evidence it had submitted 49 of them to their intended recipients -- of those 49, only ten copies could even be located and appeared complete -- and that 13 more reports went out between 13 days and over a year late. SDE disputed the count, saying it completed 35 legislative reports and emailed 25 of them, but auditors wrote they "did not receive evidence of email submission of the reports mentioned in the response."

The same pattern shows up in smaller money movements: 73 Teacher Certificate License deposits totaling $83,050 -- about 29% of the $283,419 in such deposits auditors sampled -- were posted to Core-CT two to 17 business days late, and four purchase orders totaling $246,705 sat uncommitted for one to 52 days before SDE recorded the obligation, a step state law requires before an agency incurs the cost.▸ Oversight of SDE's own governing structure showed similar gaps: of the 14 boards, councils, and committees the department leads or supports, six were inactive, nine had not posted their meeting schedules with the Secretary of the State, and five had not posted all their minutes -- lapses that, per the audit, mean "interested parties may not be informed about or be able to attend or participate at meetings."

The remaining findings are payroll-control gaps rather than money lost outright, but several are also repeats.▸ SDE rehired two retired employees who worked two and 24 days past the 120-day annual limit state pension law sets for reemployed retirees; the department had not pursued reimbursement of their excess retirement benefits until auditors flagged it, after which it recouped $9,012. Compensatory time approvals ran late in six of ten sampled cases -- six to eleven days after the hours were earned -- a finding repeated in five straight audits since fiscal 2009. In the same stretch, 74 employees in fiscal 2023 and 91 in fiscal 2024 charged leave in increments smaller than their union contracts allow, in 494 and 524 instances respectively -- also a fifth-straight repeat. And in a sample of five departing employees' vacation and sick-leave payouts totaling $201,917, auditors found SDE overpaid three employees a combined $2,786 and underpaid one employee $5,098. The audit traced this to two distinct errors: four of the five payouts were calculated using a July 2022 cost-of-living raise instead of the rate in effect on the employee's actual last day, and a fifth employee was paid for 60 and 105 accrued vacation and sick days instead of the 63 and 165 days owed.