ND Auditors Couldn't Verify Williston Schools' Books, Twice

Williston Basin Public School District No. 7 is a K-12 district in the North Dakota oil-patch city of Williston, with a general fund alone running $71.9 million in fiscal 2023 and $80.9 million in fiscal 2024.▸ A July 2026 audit⧉ commissioned by the North Dakota State Auditor's Office -- the independently elected official whose job is to audit the state's public bodies -- found the district's own accounting records were too unreliable to audit at all.

For both fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2023, the auditors issued a disclaimer of opinion: the most severe outcome a financial audit can reach short of alleging fraud outright, meaning the auditors could not gather enough evidence to say whether the district's financial statements were accurate in either direction.▸ The State Auditor's Office's own release⧉ on July 8, 2026 summarized it as 14 issues that make it 'difficult to determine if the District's financial information is accurate.'

The clearest single cause: Williston Basin did not perform monthly bank reconciliations -- the routine check that a district's own books match what the bank actually shows -- for most of two straight years.▸ In fiscal 2023 the district reconciled only June; that month alone showed a $771,625 gap between ledger and bank. Once auditors dug in and added the reconciling items the district had missed all year, the gap grew to $6,027,957, which the audit team then 'plugged' directly into the general fund's expense line just to make the books balance on paper. In fiscal 2024 the district skipped reconciliations in August, October, March and May; June's gap of $86,978 grew to $403,167 once auditors adjusted it -- a 93% improvement in dollar terms, but still an unreconciled hole for the second year running.

The same fiscal-2023 chaos surfaces elsewhere in the books.▸ The district failed to record $2,305,882 in state and federal grant revenue and $378,454 in Williams County property tax revenue on its own ledger at all -- auditors found both only by cross-checking bank statements the district hadn't reconciled to anything. Separately, the district's July 2022 opening general fund balance came in $1,877,494 lower than the prior year's audited closing balance, with no paperwork to explain why; auditors reversed the adjustment for lack of support rather than accept an unexplained number.

Under standard internal-control practice (the COSO framework the audit cites, which is the baseline U.S. auditors use to judge whether an organization's financial safeguards are adequate), someone other than the person making an accounting adjustment is supposed to review and approve it.▸ Williston Basin's business manager posted adjusting cash entries with no independent review in both years: $6,391,503 of fiscal 2023's $47,986,894 in net adjusting entries, and $5,353,372 of fiscal 2024's $5,516,627 -- effectively the entire year's total. Auditors could not even confirm the district separated basic duties like invoice-opening from payment-processing across either year, a repeat citation from prior audits that on its own 'increases the risk of fraud,' in the report's words, whether or not fraud actually occurred.

Sample-testing those entries for documentation found the failure rate worsening, not improving: in fiscal 2023, 11 of 20 tested entries lacked support, projecting to as much as $3,047,933 district-wide; in fiscal 2024, 17 of 30 lacked support, projecting to as much as $14,757,305 -- nearly five times the prior year's exposure.▸ Separately, the district overpaid the IRS by $2,032,971 in February 2023 and $143,647 in September 2023 with no documentation explaining either overpayment -- money that, if the district can't account for it, it also can't easily recover.

The same documentation gaps extend into federal money the district is trusted to spend on the government's behalf.▸ Under federal grant rules (2 CFR 200, the uniform guidance every recipient of federal funds must follow), spending has to be supported by records showing it was allowable; when auditors can't find that support, the amount becomes a questioned cost -- not proof the money was misspent, but proof nobody can currently show it wasn't. Of $1,527,887 the district spent on its Title I grant (federal funding targeted at schools with low-income students) in fiscal 2024, 54 of 60 sampled expenditures had zero supporting documentation, producing $136,372 in known questioned costs -- and, projected across the whole program at that failure rate, $1,463,906, or 95.8% of everything the grant paid for. It is a repeat finding: the same Title I documentation gap was cited in the two audits before this one and was never fixed.

The district's Education Stabilization Fund (ESSER, the federal COVID-relief education money) spending fared better but not clean: $257,784 of $1,613,557 in projected questioned costs.▸ Separately, the district could not document how it selected the construction manager for its Career and Technical Education Center project and had no procurement policy at all, so auditors could not confirm that contract was properly awarded either.