Legislative Audit presents grants summary showing roughly $3.4 billion distributed; no recipient-level audits performed in summary

Joey Budenberg, supervising senior auditor with Arkansas Legislative Audit, presented the agency's annual summary of grants distributed by the Arkansas Department of Education. He said the report compiles amounts distributed to school districts, charter schools, education cooperatives and other entities and provides narrative descriptions of programs in the attachments.

Budenberg said the report "summarizes the $3,400,000,000 that was provided as grants to school districts, charter schools, and other entities," and noted that program designations are largely determined by appropriation acts or by the Department of Education and, when applicable, federal authorities. He emphasized that the legislative audit summary did not perform recipient‑level auditing procedures for how the money was ultimately used; recipient-level audit work is performed in separate district audits.

During questions, a member asked whether the printout was taken directly from ADE systems or assembled by audit; Budenberg said program designations are typically set by appropriation language or the Department of Education and that the federal government sometimes determines classification. A member also corrected the spelling/styling of a district name: "Southside" in Independence County should be one word.

Budenberg pointed committee members to attachments in the report that list distributions by recipient and by program and to narrative descriptions included in the back of the report. He concluded by noting which funds were from public school fund sources, federal funds and other state funds, but specific line-item breakdowns for some fiscal-year totals were not read aloud during the presentation and some printed numbers in the packet required local correction.