State Auditor finds accounting issues at North Dakota college

BISMARCK, N.D. (North Dakota Monitor) – The North Dakota State Auditor’s office has found problems with the bookkeeping at one of the state’s two-year colleges.

Dakota College at Bottineau failed to reconcile monthly bank transactions with the school’s financial ledger, according to the State Auditor’s Office that looked at four months of receipts as part of a biennial audit.

The office concluded that for those four months between July 2022 to June 2024, the college had conducted transactions and held banking balances that lacked proper documentation, according to an Auditor’s Office news release on Wednesday.

The amount of unreconciled transactions ranged between about $75,000 to nearly $363,000 for each of those four months and led to a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars between the college’s financial records and its bank balances, the report showed.

“We look at this as Accounting 101,” said State Auditor Josh Gallion in an interview Wednesday.

Gallion said his office was not able to determine whether differences between the college’s financial records and bank balances were the result of accounting errors or missing cash.

“Do we think there is missing money? And my answer is, ‘I don’t know,’” Gallion said. “Without those proper reconciliations being done, transactions properly documented … it makes it very difficult to try to determine: are those transactions appropriate?”

He added there are no punitive measures associated with the results of the audit.

The report recommended that Dakota College at Bottineau perform monthly bank reconciliations. It also recommended that the reconciliations are “properly documented,” reviewed and approved.

“DCB (Dakota College at Bottineau) has had significant turnover in Business Office personnel, leading to this issue,” the college said. “Going forward, DCB will be contracting with Minot State for assistance with Business Office functions, including bank reconciliations.”

Minot State University President Steven Shirley oversees the Bottineau campus., He said the college values the work of the State Auditor’s Office. He also committed to “rectifying these bank reconciliation issues,” in accordance with the audit, according to a statement.

“This is key in making sure you are properly recording the money that is coming in and the money that is going out so that we can provide the public that assurance that we are being good stewards of the people’s money,” Gallion said.

He said his office will audit the college again in two years.

“That gives the campus time to implement those corrective actions and hopefully they can demonstrate that they can start doing this and reconciling down to a zero discrepancy amount, rather than these large swings that you are seeing,” Gallion said.

By Michael Achterling.