Their story stretched more than the mozzarella.
Education bureaucrats submitted apparently faulty receipts to justify hundreds of dollars of expenses at a Bronx pizzeria and other food purchases made by public schools, an audit found.
City Comptroller John Liu asked city investigators to look into the potentially fraudulent proof submitted after the fact for more than $500 in pizza and Pepsi purchases from Arturro’s Pizzeria in Marble Hill.
READ THE FULL AUDIT HERE
Officials in his agency said it wasn’t clear that the receipts were completely fabricated — only that they appeared to be created after the fact to cover-up lousy record-keeping by Ellis Prep Academy and its Department of Education managers.
The allegedly bogus bills were among a host of questionable credit-card purchases uncovered in an audit of five schools and their oversight office.
The review found that a whopping 64 percent of the $133,173 purchases examined were not documented or bid out properly — or weren’t justifiable expenses — including:
• $775 for five Kindles from Amazon.com
• $194 purchase from Costco.com labeled both as a refrigerator and as movie tickets
• $679 from Target.com for sofa beds.
• $1,292 for two dinner events at Calle Ocho Restaurant in The Bronx
The audit looked at only a small sample of the $17.2 million in credit card purchases by schools in fiscal 2011, and was the latest in a string of investigations that found poor oversight by the DOE.
“Greater care and discretion in the use of [credit]-cards is in order before outright waste and abuse ensues,” said Liu.
His office made 13 recommendations for how the DOE can boost its oversight of credit card purchases, 10 of which the agency backed.
A spokeswoman for the schools investigation office did not respond to an email and phone call asking whether it had opened a probe regarding the pizza pie receipts.
A DOE spokeswoman said the agency was told that a probe had already been closed with no positive findings.
“We implemented most of the Comptroller’s recommendations prior to the audit,” she said.
Additional reporting by Gillian Kleiman
City audit shows faulty receipts filed by education officials to Bronx pizzeria
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City audit shows faulty receipts filed by education officials to Bronx pizzeria
