Lawrence school officials are confident policies and procedures in place would prevent the district from losing money through fraudulent checks, as recently happened in Topeka.

The Topeka school district was scammed out of $500,000 through use of fraudulent checks. The Topeka district filed a lawsuit against US Bank for failing to identify the bad checks and recover the money.

“As to what happened in Topeka, I know that no one wanted that to happen and these things do happen,” Lawrence Supt. Randy Weseman said. “We have internal controls in our district and we are very careful. It slows us down because we are careful.”

Kathy Johnson, finance director for the Lawrence district, said that when a bank statement came into the business office, a staff member went through the statement and cross-referenced it with the checks written.

The district also will put in place a system called “positive pay” on Sept. 1. With positive pay, Johnson said the district would give the bank checks that will be processed.

“And that’s all the bank will clear,” Johnson said.

If a check comes up and it’s not on the list, the bank will call district officials, she said.

Mike Jones, finance director for Topeka public schools, said his district implemented a positive pay program in fall 2003 when it switched banks. That was before district officials discovered the fraudulent checks, he said.

Having the program has been a tremendous help, he said.

Jones said the bank wasn’t looking at the signature card to ensure signatures on the check were accurate. And, he said, signatures and the numbers on the fraudulent checks were wrong and out of order.

“There were $80,000 checks running through that they didn’t look at the signatures on,” Jones said.

He also said the district had an employee in charge of reconciling bank statements and checks. Jones said it was discovered later that when the employee couldn’t reconcile a check, the employee would list it as an outstanding check. The problem went unnoticed by auditors twice, he said.