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Fourteen days after voting to create an audit committee, Isle of Wight County supervisors named their appointees on Aug. 15 to the eight-member body tasked with keeping a closer eye on the county’s finances.

Supervisors William McCarty and Renee Rountree will represent the board and serve as co-chairs of the committee.

The supervisors also voted unanimously to name business consultant Dale Baugh, former BAE Systems Business Transformation Director Mike Stanton, and Rountree’s predecessor, former 

Supervisor Dick Grice, to the committee. County Administrator Randy Keaton, Isle of Wight Chief Financial Officer Stephanie Wells and her recently hired counterpart for Isle of Wight County Schools, CFO Liesl DeVary, will fill the remaining three seats.

Among the group’s listed tasks are receiving and reviewing the county’s periodic finance reports and providing recommendations on corrective actions. The group is to meet at least four times per year and open its meetings to the public.

McCarty first proposed the committee at the supervisors’ June 6 meeting, citing a January audit by the accounting firm Robertson Farmer Cox that found discrepancies in the county school system’s books. The supervisors voted to formally create the body on Aug. 1, but at that time hadn’t appointed its members.

The audit showed Isle of Wight County Schools having overspent its budgeted expenses for the 2022-23 fiscal year by more than $700,000, a larger deficit than the $603,163 shortfall IWCS Superintendent Theo Cramer had acknowledged to the School Board last year.

Grice, who did not run for reelection last year, had emerged as an early critic of the school system’s financial management when news of the deficit broke last year, telling Cramer at an Aug. 17, 2023, meeting that he had “no confidence” that Cramer’s then request for an additional $603,163 in county funding would cover the final deficit, nor in Cramer’s explanation of how the overspending occurred.

Cramer, in August 2023, blamed the deficit partially on a nearly $945,000 reduction in state funding coupled with insufficient budgeting for the transportation department and substitute teacher pay. He’d blamed the budgeting errors on a past CFO, Steve Kepnes, though Kepnes denied the allegation. Cramer initially attributed the state funding loss to a 2% reduction in the division’s September 2022 enrollment, though Larisa Harris, one of two CFOs to succeed Kepnes prior to the division’s May 2024 hiring of DeVary, told the School Board in September 2023 that an employee mistake on a state form submitted two months after Kepnes’ May 2022 resignation was responsible for 60% of the 2022-23 state funding shortfall.

The county’s audits for the past two fiscal years each chided IWCS for turnover in its finance department though only the 2022-23 audit found errors deemed a “material weakness,” the most serious classification of bookkeeping error.

From February through June 30, IWCS operated under a spending freeze to avoid a repeat of the 2023 shortfall.

“I’m confident that we will meet or cover the deficit from this past year,” DeVary told the School Board at its Aug. 8 meeting.

DeVary said she was still waiting as of that date on a final total for the division’s share of state sales tax revenue, and that an audit for the 2023-24 school year would likely begin around Oct. 21.