Same audit, two scopes
Both figures come from a single forensic audit by Michael Bishop & Associates, presented to the board on November 13, 2025. The audit reconciled, for six fiscal years, the dollar amount the district actually paid toward employee health-and-welfare benefits against the dollar amount the CBAs with LaBUFA and CSEA Ch. 131 authorized. The chart above is the result: every bar is a year’s deviation between the two.
$1.77M is the sum of the amber bars — the four years the district paid above the cap, with no offsets. It answers how big was the CBA non-compliance, in total, across all the years it occurred?
$1.04M is the algebraic sum of every bar including the green LaBUFA MOU credit and the sky-blue under-cap years. It answers how much net excess remains after accounting for years the district paid below the cap and for one year of bargained above-cap spending?
Bishop’s Slide 12 used the net figure as the basis for the four-option remediation framework presented to the board. CBO Manoj Roychowdhury named the gross figure verbally at the same November 13 meeting: “I don’t want to say that we are trying to minimize the extent of the error, it’s 1.77 million.” Neither figure is wrong; they’re sized to different questions.
What “above the cap” actually means
The CBAs do not promise to pay each employee’s full health-and-welfare premium. They promise that the district will contribute up to a specific dollar amount per month per eligible employee. Whatever the carriers (Anthem, Kaiser, Delta Dental, etc.) charge above that amount comes out of the employee’s paycheck via payroll deduction.
The arithmetic the audit reconciled is the difference between:
- What the district actually paid the carriers — recorded in SACS objects 3401-3402 each fiscal year, and
- What
(eligible employees) × (CBA cap per employee) × (months)would have been — the cap-authorized amount.
When the actual exceeds the authorized, the district has paid more than the CBA permits. The same total still went to the carriers — the premium is what the premium is — but the split between district share and employee share was wrong. The district covered too much; employees were deducted too little. From the carrier’s perspective, nothing unusual happened. From the bargaining unit’s perspective, the district honored more of the cost than the contract said it would. From the board’s accountability perspective, the district exceeded its CBA-authorized labor cost without putting that excess through bargaining.
This is why the over-cap dollars are small ($100K to $840K per year) relative to total H&W spend (about $5M per year). The cap-compliance gap is the delta between two large numbers, not a runaway in either of them.
Where the money went
To insurance carriers, in every case. Not to employees as cash, not to administrators as bonuses. The $1.77M and the $1.04M are both descriptions of who paid the same premiums — district funds vs. employee payroll deductions — not of any extra money the carriers received.
The practical consequence for employees was an avoided deduction rather than a deposit. Their take-home pay over the four over-paid years was, in aggregate, $1.04M higher than the CBAs prescribed. The board’s December 16, 2025 vote to absorb that amount from the General Fund was a choice not to claw it back via retroactive payroll adjustments. George Weiss’s “Manufacturing Outrage” estimate that the alternative would have raised employee premium contributions by approximately $50-$500 per month per employee describes what that claw-back would have looked like in 2026 paychecks.
The board action
“I need a motion on the floor to absorb. I need a motion on the floor to absorb the excess contribution of 1.04 million dollars in this year’s budget.” — Board President Sheri Morgan, December 16, 2025 special session
The vote was 5-0. Roychowdhury’s same-meeting derivation: “Cumulative overpayment is about 1.04 million, factoring in the 350,000 one-time payment that was appropriated by the board, but it was not allocated.” The on-record motion is for $1.04M, matching the audit’s Slide 12 actionable figure. Timeline entry: /events/2025-12-16-board-absorbs-1.04m.
How the $850K got mis-cited
A third figure — $850K — circulates in some downstream coverage as the absorbed amount. It isn’t. The $850K originated in Glass’s July 24, 2025 disclosure as the projected FY 2025-26 current-year overage (i.e., one bar on the chart above, not the cumulative motion amount). Roychowdhury referenced the same current-year scope at the March 12, 2026 second-interim presentation: “that’s about 850,000 that we are absorbed in this year’s budget” — accurate as a current-year figure but easily mistaken for the cumulative motion. George Weiss’s May 9, 2026 Substack and Steve McIntosh’s May 14, 2026 public comment both inherited that conflation downstream. The on-record motion language resolves which figure was actually voted on: $1.04M. The $850K is a real number describing a real thing — just a different thing.
What the audit itself says caused this
The audit frames the underlying cause as “internal controls gaps in setting employee contribution rates” — a process and systems characterization, not an allegation of intent. Additional allegations that circulate in the public discussion (administrators “personally saved up to $4,500/year,” a “Me too” clause matching administrator raises to union-negotiated raises, omitted material information in the December 16, 2024 First Interim Budget) are interpretive extensions of the audit findings, not direct findings of the audit itself. Those are recorded under open questions below for corroboration targeting.