A forensic audit of Tulsa Public Schools by State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd found a systemic lack of financial oversight and transparency, fraudulent transactions, conflicts of interest, and policy violations over nearly a decade. 

The audit found Tulsa Public Schools made more than $25 million in expenditures without following bidding requirements, which accounted for nearly two-thirds of the spending the investigators reviewed. The state auditor’s office reviewed $37.7 million in expenditures from 2015 to 2023 and identified more than 1,400 irregularities across 900 transactions involving at least 90 vendors, according to a report released Wednesday. 

The audit found that Tulsa Public Schools administrators routinely structured payments just below a $50,000 threshold — a tactic Byrd said “gives the appearance of an intentional attempt to bypass policy and undermine board oversight.”

Tulsa Public Schools administrators also issued additional purchase orders to vendors to increase their payments without approval of the school board. This practice resulted in an unauthorized $860,000 in spending, including $421,000 paid to an interior design consultant.

Conflicts of interest were another problem. The audit found that some Tulsa Public Schools officials violated policy by having outside business interests that overlapped with their decision-making roles at the district. Among those named were Assistant Superintendent Paula Shannon and Executive Director of Bond and Energy Management Chris Hudgins, both of whom ran private consulting businesses while overseeing vendor contracts for the school district. Hudgins received $319,024 from Allied Engineering in 2019 while managing $8.4 million in Tulsa Public Schools construction contracts awarded to the firm. Additionally, Jania Rivera-Wester, a member of the Tulsa school board, voted to approve a $390,000 contract for Growing Together, a nonprofit where her husband was the executive director and her employer, Communities in Schools of Mid-America, was a subcontractor. 

Gov. Kevin Stitt ordered the audit in July 2022 after Devin Fletcher, a Tulsa Public Schools administrator, resigned amid reports of a criminal investigation and contract irregularities. Fletcher has since pleaded guilty in federal court to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the district through fraudulent contracts. It would have been harder for Fletcher to perpetrate the scheme if school administrators had asked for itemized invoices, Byrd told reporters during a presentation of the audit findings on Wednesday. 

“As we began to test samples of TPS purchases, it soon became clear that Fletcher’s misconduct was the result of a much larger problem,” Byrd said. “Had board members acted with more diligence, exercising their fiduciary responsibilities to taxpayers, they would have been in a much better position to prevent Fletcher’s malfeasance and to provide the oversight that state law requires.” 

Byrd said that evidence has been turned over to the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office for further investigation.

“Wasted money in education is cheating a child out of needed resources,” Byrd said. “We have to find a way to make sure that the money we allocate to schools gets to the teachers and the students who need it.”

In response to the audit, Superintendent Ebony Johnson said that Tulsa Public Schools has already put new measures in place including hiring an auditor and purchasing artificial intelligence tools to detect fraud. Some school board members have accused Byrd of exaggerating the culpability of administrators and the board for political gain. Byrd has filed to run for lieutenant governor next year.

The audit detailed a $824,503 embezzlement scheme by Fletcher, an amount that exceeded what was included in his federal plea agreement. The fraud primarily revolved around Snickelbox LLC, a vendor Fletcher personally selected and used to funnel stolen money. Tulsa Public Schools paid Snickelbox $872,588 between 2018 and 2022. The audit confirmed that at least $329,278 of these payments were fraudulent.

Fletcher used Snickelbox funds to make illegal cash payments to Tulsa Public Schools employees—including $42,000 in direct cash disbursements and $4,000 in unauthorized gift cards, which violated district policies prohibiting cash-equivalent gifts that might “impair independent judgment” about business decisions.

Fletcher also fabricated invoices for his half-sister, who received $448,125 for consulting services that were never performed, the audit found. These payments went undetected for four years, with some transactions structured just below the $50,000 threshold that would have required the district to solicit bids for the project. 

The audit also found that Fletcher hired an intern for a five-week summer position at a rate of around $65 per hour, totaling $13,000, and arranged for $2,100 in housing costs to be covered by the Tulsa Schools Foundation. No documentation confirmed the intern’s service to the district.

The audit also alleged that TPS did not turn over some records to auditors and was potentially in violation of open records law. The report alleges the administrators routinely conducted business using communication apps like Slack and Google Docs, making records hard to retrieve. Emails from 2021, including those between Fletcher and former Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist when investigations into financial misconduct were beginning, were either not provided to investigators or heavily redacted. 

Tulsa Public Schools received $83 million in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds from 2020 to 2023. The audit flagged $4.9 million in “questioned costs” due to inadequate documentation, including $110,801 in unallowable reimbursements related to The Opportunity Project, a nonprofit that served as an intermediary between the district and after-school program providers.

The Opportunity Project overbilled Tulsa Public Schools by at least $96,401 in fiscal year 2022, charging the district for services that were never delivered. Despite these discrepancies, the district submitted the invoices to the Oklahoma State Department of Education for reimbursement with federal funds. Johnson responded that the State Department of Education never objected to the invoices.

The report alleges Tulsa Public Schools also circumvented laws surrounding employee compensation and issued $504,000 in unauthorized bonuses through the Foundation for Tulsa Schools. Some employees were paid retention bonuses of up to $45,000 that were never disclosed in their contracts, violating Oklahoma law. At least 65% of the teachers left the district within five years, despite the payments being intended as retention incentives.

Additionally, the audit found millions in spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that were not reported to the state in 2023, violating a recent state law banning these programs.

Gov. Kevin Stitt called the audit’s findings “deeply troubling” and urged the Attorney General’s Office to act immediately to “bring charges wherever possible.”

“The release of the audit is only the first step in holding wrongdoers accountable,” Stitt said. “This can never be allowed to happen in Oklahoma again.”