Overview
In accordance with Section 12 of Chapter 11 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the Office of the State Auditor has conducted a performance audit of Bristol Community College (BCC) for the period July 1, 2016 through December 31, 2018.
We conducted this performance audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our finding and conclusion based on our audit objective. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our finding and conclusion based on our audit objective.
Below is our audit objective, indicating the question we intended our audit to answer, the conclusion we reached regarding the objective, and where the objective is discussed in this report.
|
Objective |
Conclusion |
|
No; see Finding 1 |
To achieve our objective, we gained an understanding of the internal controls related to our audit objective by reviewing applicable laws, policies, and procedures, as well as conducting interviews with BCC officials.
Data Reliability
BCC officials (the vice president of the Administration and Finance Department and the chair of the ECE Department) provided us with an Excel workbook that contained a list of 64 BCC students who had enrolled in the college’s ECE Program and had completed teaching practicums during the audit period. We examined this workbook and tested for macros, hidden rows and columns, and hidden worksheets. We performed additional validity and integrity tests on the data, including (1) testing for missing records or missing values in key data elements, (2) scanning for duplicate entries, (3) verifying fields to detect any data validity errors, and (4) testing for values outside a designated range.
We then traced 100% of the student population from this workbook to an original list of student enrollment information maintained by BCC’s registrar’s office. Next, we examined 100% of the original registrar’s list of students who completed teaching practicums and traced the information back to the workbook.
Based on the results of these data reliability assessment procedures, we determined that the information obtained for our audit period was sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our audit work.
CORI Background Checks
To determine whether BCC performed CORI background checks on students enrolled in its ECE Program before granting them teaching practicums, we first obtained a list of students who completed teaching practicums during the audit period, July 1, 2016 through December 31, 2018. We then examined all 64 students’ personnel files to determine whether there was documentation to substantiate that each student had passed a CORI background check performed by BCC’s Human Resources Department before being assigned a teaching practicum.
| Date published: | December 20, 2019 |
|---|