Our audit of the Department of Education and Direct Aid to Public Education; collectively referred to as “Education” throughout this report, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2023, found:

•proper recording and reporting of all transactions, in all material respects, in the Commonwealth’s accounting and reporting system, Education’s financial system, and in attachments submitted to the Department of Accounts (Accounts);

•three matters involving internal control and its operation necessary to bring to management’s attention that also represent instances of noncompliance with applicable laws and regulations or other matters that are required to be reported; and

•two issues that are beyond the corrective action of Education’s management and require the cooperation of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA) to address the risks, which we report as “Risk Alerts.”

We did not perform audit work on the prior audit finding titled “Ensure the Correct Award Year is Applied to Federal Reports” as noted in the Findings Summary included in the Appendix because Education did not implement corrective action during our audit period. Corrective action has been ongoing since the fiscal year 2022 audit. We will follow up on this finding during the fiscal year 2024 audit.

In the section titled “Internal Control and Compliance Findings and Recommendations” we have included our assessment of the conditions and causes resulting in the internal control and compliance findings identified through our audit as well as recommendations for addressing those findings. Our assessment does not remove management’s responsibility to perform a thorough assessment of the conditions and causes of the findings and developing and appropriately implementing adequate corrective actions to resolve the findings as required by the Department of Accounts in Section 10205 – Agency Response to APA Audit of the Commonwealth Accounting Policies and Procedures Manual. Those corrective actions may include additional items beyond our recommendations.