Isle of Wight County supervisors voted unanimously on Aug. 1 to formally create an audit committee, but held off appointing its members.

The proposal calls for seven members, two of whom would be Board of Supervisors members who would co-chair the committee. The group would include another three at-large members, County Administrator Randy Keaton and Isle of Wight Chief Financial Officer Stephanie Wells.

The group would meet at least four times per year and its meetings would be open to the public.

Isle of Wight County Supervisor William McCarty first proposed creating the committee in June, citing a January audit by the accounting firm Robertson Farmer Cox that found discrepancies in the county school system’s books.

The audit showed Isle of Wight County Schools having overspent its budgeted expenses for the 2022-23 fiscal year by more than $700,000, a larger deficit than the $603,163 IWCS Superintendent Theo Cramer had acknowledged to the School Board in August.

Supervisor Rudolph Jefferson initially questioned whether the committee should include any supervisors if the goal was to put outside eyes on the county’s finances, but Keaton said the Southeastern Public Service Authority, the regional waste management agency of which Isle of Wight is a member, also has an audit committee that includes representation from its 16-member board of directors.

Robertson Farmer Cox, in the current audit and one performed in 2023 for the 2021-22 fiscal year, each time issued the county a clean opinion declaring the county’s financial statements “can be relied upon” for accuracy, but this year contended that while the division’s books are accurate now, they weren’t when IWCS first turned over the financial data auditors requested. The past two years’ audits had each chided IWCS for turnover in its finance department, but only the most recent found errors deemed to rise to the level of a “material weakness,” the most serious classification of bookkeeping error.

Cramer, in February, presented the School Board with a plan for resolving the deficit by implementing a spending freeze through June 30.

McCarty had initially proposed a committee of up to nine members, with Cramer and the school division’s current CFO, Liesl DeVary, serving as potential members.