A Wyoming Audit Owes a Reservation School $341,142 -- Or $341,692

A Wyoming Department of Audit review⧉ found that Fremont County School District #21 -- which serves roughly 500 pre-K-12 students on the 3,374,272-acre Wind River Indian Reservation⧉ in Fort Washakie -- was underfunded by $341,142 for school year 2022-23, a total the audit's Executive Summary states outright and its reconciliation table confirms line by line⧉.▸ The same report's cover letter to the district's own Board of Trustees states a different number first: an underfunding of approximately $341,692⧉ -- $550 more than the figure the report gives everywhere else.

Wyoming pays school districts through a formula called the Wyoming Funding Model: each year, districts report data on attendance (Average Daily Membership, or ADM⧉), transportation, special education, payroll, and local tax revenue, and the state's Department of Education runs it through a formula that sets a Foundation Guarantee -- what the state owes the district before subtracting what the district raises itself, its Local Resources.▸ Wyoming Statute 9-1-513⧉ requires the state's Department of Audit to periodically check that reported data for accuracy against the district's own records. This audit, covering July 2022 through June 2023, is that check for Fort Washakie's district -- and it found errors in all five categories the model relies on.

Most of the money at stake traces to a single miscoded line, not the ongoing documentation gaps described below.▸ In May 2023, the Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) ordered every district to make a technical correction to its accounting records⧉, stemming from legislation passed that year, and told the district what the correction amount was. Fort Washakie's district recorded that amount correctly in its general ledger -- but its previous business manager also reported that same amount on the state's WDE 401 funding form as a 'prior-year refund,' which was not what it was⧉, a different reporting mistake by the same district staffer responsible for the errors below. Under the funding model, a prior-year refund reduces what a district is owed. The auditors' fix restores $472,109 -- $466,204 in expenditures plus $5,905 in payroll -- that the miscoded line had cost the district.

The district's own errors ran the other way, cutting $130,967 from what it was due.▸ Local Resources documentation was the single biggest source of raw errors⧉: auditors tested 49 local-revenue transactions and found 41 had no supporting documentation, 28 of them in one indirect-cost account alone -- undocumented revenue gets recategorized as local money, which lowers state funding, and it's a repeat finding from prior audits. Attendance tracking failed the same way three audits in a row⧉: students absent 10 or more consecutive days are supposed to be dropped from the enrollment count, and weren't. On the bus fleet, the district claimed reimbursement for all the unleaded fuel its multi-purpose vehicles burned, though its own mileage logs showed only 25.6% of that fuel went to student transportation⧉.

The district is also three years delinquent on the independent CPA audits state law requires -- 2023, 2024, and 2025 are all outstanding -- and the one it did finish, for fiscal 2022, came back with a disclaimer of opinion⧉ because outside auditors couldn't gather enough evidence to certify the books at all.▸ The state auditors trace the pattern to a specific failure: missing separation of duties, review, and oversight -- 'tone at the top' -- with the board and senior administration never holding the business manager accountable for the delinquency⧉.

Run the report's own reconciliation table and the arithmetic holds: the $6,373,904 the district was originally entitled to, minus the $6,242,937 it was adjusted down to, is a $130,967 cut; the $472,109 special-education correction minus that $130,967 cut is $341,142 -- exactly what the Executive Summary states and the table's own final line, 'Amount Due To District,' confirms⧉.▸ But the number that reaches the district's Board of Trustees first, in the report's cover letter over the state auditors' own signatures, is $341,692⧉ -- $550 higher than the figure the rest of the same document supports twice.

The same table has a second, independent $550 slip: its own displayed subtotal of the ADM and Transportation/Payroll changes reads ($49,373), but those two line items actually sum to ($49,923)⧉ -- the number the table's very next line, the Corrected Foundation Guarantee, actually reconciles against.▸ Nothing in the report flags either discrepancy or says which top-line number is the one the state will actually pay. For a district this small -- with an annual Foundation Guarantee under $8 million -- $550 is a rounding error next to $341,142. It's also the kind of gap a state auditing agency exists to catch, showing up twice in a document whose entire purpose is catching exactly that kind of gap in someone else's books.