By Caitlin Sievers | AZ Mirror
The Arizona Department of Education prioritized appeasing voucher school parents angry about payment backlogs over implementing a new oversight law, a report from the Arizona Auditor General shows.
In response to the report, the Education Department defended its practices, saying its lack of action to claw back money paid for unallowable purchases, like a $1,000 generator, didn’t equal a failure of program administration.
The law, which went into effect in September 2024, required the Education Department to consult with the Arizona Auditor General’s Office to create risk-based auditing processes for the school voucher program. Last year during a Joint Legislative Audit Committee meeting, John Ward, the executive director of the ESA program, said that wasn’t a priority.
In a report released last week, the auditor general found the Department of Education’s oversight of the voucher program, formally called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, to be lacking. Auditors described a risk-based auditing process from ADE that was haphazard, continually changing and that lacked concrete instructions for employees.
Those processes resulted in automatic approval of explicitly unallowed purchases for things like amusement park and airline tickets, hotel stays and meals, according to the audit report.
