Investigations & Compliance

Once your charter school is up and running, you will realize that there are many requirements you have to comply with: Federal, State, and local. It is of course always best to have good processes and procedures in people in place to make sure that you are doing a good job with both complying and documenting compliance on the front end. We can help advise on setting up good processes for compliance review. However whether or not you have good processes for compliance review in place, it is likely that your charter will be subject to audits and reviews. In some cases these will be on a regular basis, and in other cases these will be more likely to be done if there is a complaint.

Audits and investigations should always be taken seriously. And they may cover many different areas of your operations, ranging from FTE audits to audits of how you’ve spent federal grants. There may be investigations about whether your in compliance with the education your providing your special needs students, audits of whether your teachers are appropriately assigned and certified, investigations triggered by OCR or Inspector General complaints, and so on – is impossible to list every possible permutation of an order investigation but be well armed to know that there are a multitude of possibilities when you are operating a charter school.

We can help you prepare for respond to and defend your actions in the context of audits and investigations. As we mentioned before these need to be taken seriously, because they can be the basis for serious action or even termination being taken against your charter school. Again we encourage you to contact us, preferably before a formal audit or investigation has even started, but at a minimum once you become aware of a formal investigation or audit. Again this is one of those categories where effort on the front end can often save endless problems and cost on the back end.