This "LakeCountyFiscalRangers" (aka Lake County Fiscal Rangers ) blog is focused on monitoring and improving the fiscal management and oversight of the $700-million budget Lake County, Florida School District which runs all the schools in Lake County, Florida. I am an experienced corporate internal auditor and anti-corruption specialist who recently moved to Lake County, FL to establish a small residential construction business (not related to schools or consulting). However, news articles about resistance to the new internal audit function, plus my review of School District documents related to fiscal management indicate that fiscal and business management needs improvement, so I established this blog. The initial issue was published news articles on the resistance of the elected superintendant to a new internal audit department established by the separately elected School District Board in the summer of 2006. As an experienced internal auditor, red flags pop up immediately when a organization manager tries to restrict internal auditing from oversight duties, so I started reasearching the issue more deeply.
One personal incentive is that I lived in Orange County, CA where the elected County Commissioners ignored published articles in the early 1990's on questionable investment methods used by the elected Treasurer, and he lost over a BILLION dollars in bad investments. The County declared bankruptcy, throwing the entire County into Chaos in the early 1990's and collapsing the real estate market. I don't want a similar (but smaller) catastrophe to happen in Lake County. The Lake County School District is larger than any other employer in the county and larger than the County government. My review of documents and news articles indicates that the School District seems to need more oversight and management improvement. The School District should not be confused with the separate Lake County Government, which appears to have an effective internal audit department and better fiscal reporting, and has an entirely separate elected Board and staff.
Another factor is that Lake County does not have a 4-year college or large corporate presence that would improve the fiscal control knowledge level of locally elected officials, staff or the public, thus disclosure of issues commonly controlled in other districts will help educate them on how to improve fiscal operations.
I have visited and will continue to visit the District public meetings to monitor fiscal and management control and efficiency issues. Fiscal issues related to other County government agencies or issues like the slowness of Highway 441 construction will be added once enough information is collected.
All the blog postings and opinions are my own, and not on behalf of any outside organization, business interest, government employees or elected officials. I do include copies of published news articles following the "fair use" doctrine to illustrate issues and I provide references to the source.
Vance Jochim
Tavares homeowner
