By Gerardo R. Partido
Variety News Staff

THE Office of the Public Auditor has denied claims made by the Guam Public School System that the budget given to public schools does not include the salary hikes granted to teachers.
In a letter to GPSS, the Legislature, and the Department of Administration, Public Auditor Doris Flores Books said that while GPSS now claims that the $155,498,260 projected for payroll does not factor in the pay increases, OPA’s analysis showed that the pay hikes were indeed factored into the budget.
Pursuant to Public Law 28-149, OPA is required to approve GPSS’s projected schedules of monthly cash disbursements for each school, division, and program, by expenditure category, during the fiscal year.
Public statements were recently made by acting GPSS Superintendent Ken Chargualaf stating that the $172 million budget for the public schools does not take into account the 14-percent pay raises given to certified teachers this year, and the schools need to ask lawmakers to increase the budget to about $190 million.
But according to OPA, its analysis showed that the budget included the 14 percent increase granted for teacher pay hikes, pay adjustments for school principals, assistant school principals, and associate superintendents, as well as the 1.13 increase in retirement fund contribution rate for locally-funded positions.
The OPA analysis estimated FY 2007 payroll expenditures to be $152,379,574, which is $3,118,686 less than GPSS projected cost of $155,498,260.
According to OPA, GPSS is still in the process of making retroactive payments to personnel affected by the various pay adjustments.
OPA also stressed that the analysis was conducted for positions funded by the General Fund only as the $172,957,804 appropriation in the Budget Act excludes federally-funded positions.
OPA plans to revisit its analysis after the completion of the first quarter of FY 2007.
“We anticipate that by the end of the first quarter, payroll costs will have reflected the effects of the pay adjustments and 1.13 percent increase in retirement fund contributions, which will then be a better basis on which to refine the estimation base used in the calculation,” Brooks said in an earlier OPA report.