get another person on the account and you will have documentation as to the date that it happened. Then, if anything is found when the books are checked, you can show that it occured before the second person was added to the account. Protect your account ASAP.

I am new to this and I hope that I am doing this right but I had a question also about the audit. We asked for a treasure report be done and were given a summary that had an amount on it and when asked the treasure if this was the balance in the account she said no there was x amount a dollars and it did not match what was on the report. There are 3 new board members and we asked her to please bring the books so we can review them she said that she did not have to give us that info. I am wondering "what do we do" the treasurer is the only one on the account and has been for a while we as the new board thought it would be good to add someone onto the account but no one wants to do it until we know that everything adds up. Please help

Yes, we an have audit any time the treasurer position changes hands. You may have a parent that is an accountant that will do it for FREE. But it protects the outgoing AND incoming Treasurer as well as making sure that all business has been conducted accurately and timely for the PTO.

My post above (audit committee) was about our middle school PTO and high school PTA. But I'd forgotten about our elementary school.

The elementary PTO recovered from an embezzlement several years ago and we worked closely with the school district auditor to establish good financial processes. He did an initial audit at the principal's request when the embezzlement was first suspected. And he was a big help giving us guidance about processes to establish.

Later, after we formed a new PTO, the auditor offered to do the routine summer audit and has continued to provide that service for 5+ years now. It's not part of the school district's policy. With over 20 campus schools, I can't imagine he could find time.

But because we built that relationship, he continues to do ours year after year. It might be worth asking your district (but you'd need to be careful it doesn't look like you suspect mis-use; you don't want misunderstandings).

We have an audit done annually. The current treasurer turns the books over to an auditor and the new treasurer receives the books when the audit is complete. We have had parents who are accountants volunteer their time to do the audit and we have even had accountants in our community do the audit for free(and our tax statement). Ask around.

I personally wouldn't want to take over the financial operations from someone else until an audit has been performed.

I agree with JHB, you don't have to necessarily pay someone to get an effective audit done. It should be done, imo, once a year anyhow. If anything, just to make sure nothing (receipts, requests and so on) has been lost, misplaced, not filed, etc.

Always good to have the ducks in a row...