Hood River Co. School District receives eighth consecutive clean audit

“An unmodified opinion confirms the district’s financial statements are a ‘true and fair’ representation of our financial position and the district is in compliance with all Government Accounting Standards Board requirements,” said Holmes.

It was the district’s eighth consecutive unmodified opinion.

Kamp said the purpose of the audit for the district is three-fold: “We perform the financial statement audit and that’s where we test the financial statements presented by management in order to determine if they’re fairly stated; we perform the Oregon Minimal Standards compliance audit, and that is where we test various laws and regulations to ensure the district is in compliance with those; and lastly, we perform the federal single audit, and we test different federal grants on a yearly basis to ensure that the compliance requirements of those grants are met because federal dollars have a lot of strings attached.”

Kamp said the results were very good. “For the financial statement audit we issued an unmodified opinion on the financial statements — that’s a clean opinion with no reservations. For Oregon Minimum Standards, we found no exceptions requiring comment except as noted on page 92 of the report, there was one minor budget item report (a budget over expenditure of $14,663). And for the Federal Single Audit, we found no issues of non-compliance and no questioned costs.”

Kamp further said there were no difficulties in preparing and completing the audit. “The business office is wonderful to work with,” she said. “Doug did a great job and leads the team very well, with no disagreements about accounting or auditing issues that came up.”

Board Chair Chrissy Reitz said that, while there is a lot of language in the document, it simply means the financial team “has done a clean job” of tracking the district’s finances.

“It’s really important that we are using the money and keeping track of it the way we are telling the community that we are,” she said. “These are public funds and we are responsible for them, and this audit shows that we are keeping very good track of what we’re doing and we’re spending the money where we’re supposed to be spending it. This is a real kudos to our financial team … Thank you Tara for doing the audit, and thank you Doug and your whole team — I know how hard you guys work on this and all year long, how hard you work on keeping track of our finances for us, and that makes us a very strong district.”