by Billie Jo Turner, Chief Financial Officer Lowell Public Schools

I wanted to address some misinformation circulating regarding financial practices in the School Department around what have become known as “bad bills.”

As a lifelong Lowellian, who attended Lowell Public Schools and UMass Lowell, and worked for years in the accounting field I had never, either in my studies, in the professional realm, or in state law had heard the term “bad bill” until I started working for the City of Lowell.

There is nothing fraudulent about these bills. Rather, they are bills that have been delayed by various reasons beyond our control and did not get paid during the year in which they were incurred.  The two most important things to note about the bills brought forward to the City Council are that the services billed for by the vendors were completed and personally certified by me, and the school department has their own funds to pay these vendors. I assure you that internal controls are being followed. I would like to explain some important notes to my neighbors and teammates on both the school and city side:

• LPS continuously adapts to problems found with invoicing by implementing new internal controls or improvements as situations arise.
• The relevance of Massachusetts General Law (MGL) C44 S64 with paying delayed bills should be researched legally to determine whether it is a true requirement for payment.

Lowell Public Schools has been rebuilding its finance team over the last four years and works hard to avoid “sloppy accounting.” We are often limited by what the vendors offer as invoice styles or the timeliness of their accounting offices.  Often times, they are small businesses whose expertise lies in their trade rather than the accounting end of business.  Over the last four years, we have identified the problems that cause delayed bills at that time and addressed them.  Each time, we see a marked improvement and then another type of problem arises.  Below are some examples:

• School staff were making orders without purchase orders so we offered training and frequent reminders about the proper process. This resulted in a significant decrease in delayed bills caused by the schools.
• Inevitable and unforeseen bills with out-of-district tuition caused by homeless placements or Department of Children and Families (DCF) placements have been minimized by working with City staff to show that these are out of the control of LPS staff.
• The problem of vendors sending bills to the wrong person/place was addressed by adding an accounts payable email directly on the purchase order for vendors to utilize.

The current issues we are now seeing are delayed bills arriving due to people working remotely during Covid and timing differences.  For instance, if a purchase order was created in FY21 but supply chain shortages delayed the project, the work may have not occurred until the following year.  To make matters worse, the work could have started and then halted again due to more supply chain issues.  This would cause purchase order dates and invoices to inconsistent. Delayed bills may be inevitable but we are committed to minimizing them.

MGL C44 S64 states that “any town or city having unpaid bills of previous fiscal years which may be legally unenforceable due to the insufficiency of an appropriation in the fiscal year in which such bills were incurred…  by a two-thirds vote of the city council, appropriate money to pay such bills.”  This law seems to cover bills in which there was no funding.  It is specifying bills that had “no appropriation in the year in which incurred” and it states that the City Council will appropriate city funds to pay for such.  For the last three years, we have had untimely bills that arrived late but each time there had been money allocated in the year incurred and sufficient funds to pay in the year received.  Thus, the law does not apply to our delayed bills. In addition, the law that states the City Council will appropriate funds, which also does not apply to our situation. Lowell Public Schools has not asked the City to pay these delayed bills.  Rather, we use funds controlled by the School Committee to fund them.

All in all, thus far, the LPS bills are not “good bills gone bad.”  Rather, they are good bills that were “too slow.”  As a Lowell taxpayer, I feel safe when I know there are gatekeepers to stop wasteful or corrupt spending to occur.  Please know that there are guard dogs on both sides of the fence: the school side and the City side.  After all, we are all guarding the same house.