Internal control is a process, meaning internal controls represent much more than a school district’s procedures, policies and separation of duties. The overall process is no stronger than the human resource component, represented by all of the employees in addition to the governing board. Administrators and managers in smaller entities have inherent advantages in actively monitoring processes to a degree that is not feasible in larger organizations where higher-level administrators delegate to teams of middle managers that in turn delegate to supervisors and coordinators. This serves to highlight how daily monitoring of operations and processes where the district’s superintendent can easily walk through all campus hallways and all operational offices in just a couple of hours.
However, regardless of the enrollment size, and the corresponding scale and complexity of daily operations, internal control processes must be documented to be effective. For these reasons it is expected that the documentation, if printed, in different districts will range from a few binders to bookcases full of binders. Also, employees should have ready access to universally applicable documentation, like the employee handbook, in addition to specific up-to-date documentation (hopefully online) tailored to what they need to understand and reference to successfully perform their respective roles and responsibilities. Lastly, an effective year-around training program combined with well-documented processes should mean that managers and supervisors should rarely hear “I did not know” to the question of the day.
We should not overlook that with good documentation, and effective training, monitoring and communication processes in place, internal control processes serve to provide reasonable but not absolute assurance for readily obvious economic and practical reasons. So when bad news arrives, the first rule of an effective communication system is, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” We should constructively view a failure as a learning opportunity.