Corruption Evaluation the Oak Valley Elementary Parent

Corruption Evaluation

The Oak Valley Elementary Parent Teacher Organization is a small, non-profit organization that exists to help provide financial and other support to the Oak Valley Elementary School. The Parent Teacher Organization operates independently of the elementary school and outside of the auspices of any national organizations that generally provide oversight and structure to similar organizations. It is a volunteer organization and all parents of children currently enrolled at the elementary school all eligible for membership in the organization. However, while all parents are eligible for membership in the PTO, the members vote on the board members, and then the board members vote to make all decisions for the PTO. The board is composed of a president, vice president, treasurer, and secretary.

The PTO's main point is to provide assistance to the school. While it helps coordinate parent volunteers for anything for which the school needs volunteer assistance, it has been organized largely because of its ability to provide financial contributions to the school The PTO engages in a variety of fundraising activities in order to raise the money to pay for certain school activities. These fundraisers include: a cookie dough sale, yearbook sales, t-shirt sales, accessory sales, a school store, and a school carnival. The funds from previous sales have been used to purchase playground equipment, buy computers for the computer lab, sponsor the field trips each year, and pay for various teacher-appreciation activities.

The extent of the corruption problem in the organization is not known prior to the audit. The board convened to authorize payment for a new awning for the playground. The treasurer informed them that they did not have sufficient funds to pay for the awning. However, the other board members believe that there should be sufficient funds to pay, not only for the awning, but also for other projects. The treasurer's funds received from various different fundraisers do not match the numbers that the board members have been able to locate from other sources. However, prior to the evaluation, the board members are uncertain whether the treasurer has embezzled the money, or whether other volunteer members have embezzled the funds, prior to returning the receipts and money over to the treasurer.

The corruption in the organization seems to be of relatively recent development. The organization ended the last year with a surplus, which it used to finance beginning-of-the-year activities for the new school year. It was only by the spring semester of that year that they discovered that there was a significant amount of missing money. The fact that the corruption appears to be new is notable, because the board members have not changed over the last three years. However, smaller-scale embezzlement may have occurred in prior years, and simply not been detected because the PTO had sufficient funds for all of its planned projects.

It should take approximately two weeks to conduct the performance evaluation. The board is willing to turn over all of its records to the evaluators, which would, theoretically, reduce investigative time. However, there are some concerns about the authenticity of some of the records maintained by the board. Therefore, the independent auditor will need to seek new documentation from outside vendors, where possible. In addition, once the embezzler has been identified, the auditor needs to prepare sufficient evidence to provide to the police to support prosecution of the embezzler. Furthermore, the auditor will need to perform a Corruption Opportunity Test. "The objective of the Corruption Opportunity Test is to determine if the actual circumstances prevailing in an organization are conducive to corruption and if so, to what extent. It is possible that the systems and procedures of the organization are not robust, yet the culture of the organization or the overall environment of the country act as a deterrent and people still do not indulge in corruption at a significant scale. It could be vice versa as well" (Modugu et al., 2012). Therefore, the auditor needs to suggest ways to eliminate opportunities for corruption.

The evaluation will assess several things with regard to the organization leadership. "That corruption benefits at least some of those in power makes it a difficult problem to tackle" (Klitgaard, 1988). Therefore, the evaluation needs to assess several things about the organizational leadership. First, which of the leaders had the opportunity to access funds? Have any of the leaders violated some of the safeguards that were established to prevent the possibility of embezzlement? What are the personal relationships between the leaders? Do any of the leaders have an apparent underlying influx of personal funds? Are the leaders willing to cooperate with the evaluators?