The Southern Cayuga Central School District Board of Education's audit committee may have three vacancies Monday.

The board will meet at 7 p.m. Monday for its annual reorganization meeting, during which it will formally appoint three board members to sit on the audit committee. Jim Wilcox, Dean Winspear and Leonard Jordan have held those roles for the past year, but have threatened to resign their commission on the committee if certain conditions are not met.

The friction is over the responsibilities of the audit committee and what role it has with scrutinizing several district business documents, including the finance report.

Internal auditor Julie Burnham, who also sits on the committee, made a distinction between an audit committee and a finance committee during the June 16 meeting. She said that an audit committee is meant to provide oversight in the risk assessment of the district's fiscal operations, not to review the monetary transactions, warrants and other business-related items. Reviewing the finance reports was distracting the committee from doing its specified job, she said, and urged the members to operate more like an audit committee.

The three board members stopped receiving the finance reports, which resulted in a threat to resign their commission during the June 30 meeting unless they receive all of the financial documents.

“Without information, how are we supposed to do our job?” Wilcox asked. “If we are going to do what Julie said last week, it's time to get rid of the audit committee and three of you on this board become the audit committee.”

Winspear articulated much of the same.

“If the superintendent and the business manager and the rest of the board want it run this way, and you want to take that control back, we appoint you, you and you to do it,” he said, pointing to board president Ted Rejman and members Steve Morse and Teresa Lipfert. “We'll totally resign if that's what you want.”

Rejman, Morse and Lipfert pointed out that the district pays a claims auditor to look at the financial warrants and other related financial material and it's not the committee's responsibility to comb through it a second time.

After several minutes of bickering, the board ultimately decided to keep the status quo until Monday's reorganization meeting. All members of the audit committee and the school attorney will attend.

Staff writer Alyssa Sunkin can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 239 or alyssa.sunkin@lee.net