Barely a month before Superintendent Devon Horton was indicted on federal charges related to financial crimes, auditors issued a report about the use of district-issued purchasing cards in the DeKalb County school system.
The auditors identified instances where people were able to spend more than they were allowed and make purchases in prohibited categories. Overall, DeKalb officials said they found few causes for concern in Georgia’s third-largest district.
“There was a lot of surprise about how clean this audit was,” said Joel Thibodeaux, the district’s executive director of internal audits, at a Sept. 4 audit committee meeting where he presented the findings.
The results may hold new interest in DeKalb, considering last week’s indictment accuses Horton of misusing a district-issued P-card in his old job.
The federal indictment filed in Illinois mainly accuses Horton of hiring his friends for work with the Evanston-Skokie School District 65 and accepting thousands of dollars in kickbacks between 2020 and 2023. But it also accuses him of using his P-card to pay for more than $10,000 in personal expenses. Local reporting in Illinois showed that those expenses likely included travel to Georgia after he was hired here. District 65 told the Evanston Roundtable that several “erroneous” expenses were repaid immediately.
The DeKalb school board put Horton on paid administrative leave when the indictment came out. Asked Monday if the school board may be pursuing a termination of his contract, a district spokesperson said they have no additional information to share. His arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday.
Horton’s spending in DeKalb County didn’t come up in the audit presentation. But auditors found that there were instances of cardholders being able to exceed the allowable purchasing limits of $5,000 per day and $20,000 per month.
“It wasn’t a lot of that,” said Jamie Amos, the principal auditor for the outside group that conducted the audit, “but we did find a few instances where that happened.”
The district planned to work with its bank to set controls for the cards.
The audit also found instances where people were able to make “prohibited transactions,” or buy things from merchants that should have been restricted. And it found that the district’s policies do not clearly outline the purchasing limits for the school board and the superintendent.
Auditors did not disclose information about the cardholders and transactions at the public meeting, instead promising to share them with board members in a closed-door meeting.
The school board in January agreed to pay $85,000 to Forvis Mazars to examine its P-card policies. Auditors evaluated a sample of transactions between July 1, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2024. DeKalb has issued more than 200 P-cards, including one to every principal.
“(We’ve) had multiple audits over the last three-ish years and pretty much all of them have been extremely troubling,” said Audit Committee Chair Allyson Gevertz. “This is really good news for us ... The complaints generally that I hear (about P-cards) are that we’re too strict. So I will take that any day!”
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