I’ve occasionally posted audits of school districts in New York State conducted by the NYS Comptroller’s Office. Yesterday, Comptroller DiNapoli released some new audits yesterday. One of them involved an audit of information technology at the East Quogue Union Free School District in Suffolk County. The audit covered the period July 1, 2012 — August 31, 2013.
For context, note that EQUFSD is a small district. It operates one school, with approximately 450 students attending Kindergarten through Grade 6. The District contracts with a neighboring school district to educate 428 additional students who attend Grades 7 through 12. Of the 86 District employees, 33 are non-instructional. The District’s budgeted expenditures for the 2013-14 fiscal year are $22,410,732, funded primarily with real property taxes.
From the summary of the audit results:
The Board also needs to improve controls over the District’s IT system. The District does not have policies regarding acceptable computer use, e-mail and internet use or breach notification. The lack of a computer use policy increases the risk of inappropriate computer use (either intentional or accidental), which could potentially expose the District to virus attacks or compromise systems and data, including key financial and confi dential information.
The District also did not establish controls over user access rights. District officials did not properly assign administrator rights and gave an account clerk access to modules of the financial software package that were not consistent with her job duties. This increases the risk that unauthorized changes to accounting records could occur and not be detected.
Finally, although District officials indicated that the financial software system has the ability to generate audit logs, the logs are not being generated and used to monitor system activities. As a result, District officials’ ability to detect and address unauthorized activities is compromised.
The state recommended:
- The Board should adopt and implement:
- A comprehensive computer policy for IT operations. This policy should establish guidelines for acceptable use of IT equipment and systems.
- A breach notification policy.
- All District personnel should be provided with the employee computer use policy and understand its provisions.
- District officials should develop written procedures for granting, changing and terminating access rights to the financial software system and assign user access rights based on job duties.
- The Board should designate someone independent of business office operations to be the financial software system administrator.
- District officials should routinely generate and review financial software audit logs to monitor user activity and monitor compliance with computer usage policies.
The district did not agree with all of the state’s findings or recommendations, and their response is appended to the audit. The state responded to their letter in notes following the superintendent’s letter.
Of concern, the district notes that they will contract with a consultant to audit logs “at least semi-annually,” but note that expense will come at the expense of services to the students. With respect to the auditing, the state responded, “The decision to either expend additional funds or implement simple compensating control procedures for management to routinely review computer audit logs rests with the Board.” That’s true, of course, but I wonder whether parents in the district are aware of the situation or risks.
If you were a parent concerned about the privacy and security of your child’s information, would you be satisfied with this report, or would you shrug and agree with the superintendent’s position?
You can access the full audit report which has additional details here (pdf).