Every figure ever cited in a Jericho Voice piece traces to one of fifteen public documents — five appropriation budget master drafts, nine audited financial statements, and the December 2016 State Comptroller report. We compiled them into one workbook so any resident can verify any number. Here is what is in each tab and how to check the math.

In "They Were Told. They Did It Bigger," we walked through the December 2016 NYS Comptroller audit and the eight subsequent fiscal years of audited financial statements. The State documented that Jericho UFSD had circumvented the 4% statutory fund balance limit through chronic over-budgeting and phantom appropriated fund balance. The District agreed in writing. And the data shows the pattern continued.

The audit reports are public. The appropriation budget master drafts are public. The State Comptroller report is public. The data is all there — it is just spread across fifteen PDFs spanning a decade. The workbook is the work of putting them next to each other. It is published so any reader can verify a number rather than take our word for it.

The workbook does not interpret. It compiles. The interpretation lives in the articles.

Every cell in the workbook traces back to one of these public files:

Five appropriation budget master drafts published by Jericho UFSD: 2018-19, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2024-25, and 2026-27. Each contains the full line-item budget — typically 230 to 300 individual account codes — with prior-year ST-3 actuals shown alongside the Adopted Budget for the year being voted on.

Nine audited financial statements filed with the Office of the State Comptroller, covering FY 2017 (year ended June 30, 2017 = 2016-17 school year) through FY 2025. Each contains a Schedule of Revenues, Expenditures and Changes in Fund Balance — Budget and Actual presenting Original Budget, Final Budget, and Actual side by side for every general fund category.

One State Comptroller audit: Report 2016M-328, Jericho Union Free School District — Financial Management, dated December 2016. Available at osc.ny.gov.

That is the entire chain of custody. No third-party data. No reconstructed numbers. No estimates.

The workbook has fourteen tabs, organized in five groups.

Summary — every fiscal year from FY 2017 through FY 2025, with each year's audit-derived Total Final Budget, Actual, year-end encumbrances, expenditure underspend, revenue over budget, and the resulting manufactured surplus. Plus a 9-year cumulative total and a per-year average. This is the first table on the tab and the simplest answer to "how big was the surplus, year by year, and cumulatively?"

A second table on the same tab shows the Adopted Budget vs ST-3 Actual view from the appropriation budget PDFs, alongside the audit's surplus figure for the same year, so the two views can be compared directly. (Why they differ is explained in the methodology section below.)

State Audit 2016 — a faithful reconstruction of OSC Report 2016M-328, including all three figures from the State's report (Overestimated Appropriations, Unrestricted Fund Balance, Recalculated Unrestricted Funds), the eight formal findings, the five recommendations, and the District's recorded response. The page references for each citation are noted. The tab exists so readers do not have to download a separate State document to see what OSC actually said.

Long-Term Trend — the State Comptroller's data (FY 2013-2016) and the audit-derived data (FY 2017-2025) on a single 13-year table. State-period rows are highlighted to distinguish OSC's figures from our audit-extracted figures. FY 2016 shows as a deficit; the tab notes that the deficit reflects a $16.3M voter-authorized capital transfer, not operating performance.

Audit Comparison — the full Original Budget / Final Budget / Actual / Variance reconciliation for each of the nine post-2016 audits. Each year's section shows the Total Revenues line, the Total Expenditures (excluding Operating Transfers Out) line, and the Total Expenditures and Other Uses (including transfers) line, with the manufactured surplus calculation explicitly built from those inputs.

This is the tab to open if you want to see how each year's surplus number was constructed and where it came from on each audit's published schedule. Page references are in the source line at the top of each section.

One Budget vs Actual tab per fiscal year — FY 2017-18, FY 2018-19, FY 2020-21, FY 2021-22, FY 2022-23, FY 2023-24, and FY 2024-25. (FY 2019-20 is omitted because no appropriation budget master draft in the chain of custody contains a 2019-20 Adopted Budget column.)

Each tab compares the Adopted Budget against the ST-3 Actual at the line-item level — typically 230 to 300 individual account codes — with Variance ($) and Variance (%) for each line, grouped by audit section (Board of Education, Finance, Staff, Teaching, Pupil Personnel Services, and so on).

A yellow caveat banner is printed at the top of each of these tabs: the Grand Total on the Adopted Budget vs ST-3 view will not equal the audit's manufactured surplus. The Adopted Budget is the voter-approved budget at the May vote — it does not include mid-year voter-authorized capital reserve appropriations. ST-3 Actuals include Operating Transfers Out, including those mid-year capital transfers. Capital transfers are typically large ($10-15M in any year with a voter-approved capital project), so the Grand Total view shows a small variance where the audit shows a multi-million-dollar underspend. The audit (Audit Comparison and Summary tabs) is the apples-to-apples surplus view. The per-year tabs are for line-item operating analysis.

One Raw — PDF tab per source appropriation budget master draft. Account code, Section, Subcategory, Account Name, every numeric column from the original PDF, and the District's own Comments. No transformations, no aggregations. This is the chain of custody for the Adopted Budget and ST-3 Actual columns that feed every Budget vs Actual tab.

Pick any number from any Jericho Voice piece. Walk it back to its audit page in five minutes.

Example. "$5.36 million underspend on Teaching - regular school in FY 2017."

That is the audit's own published number minus the audit's own published number. The article does not interpret it. The workbook does not transform it. The number is the number.

This works for every figure in every Jericho Voice piece. The workbook makes the navigation easier; the audit pages are always the source of truth.

Three things to know before opening the workbook.

Manufactured Surplus is defined consistently throughout as:

This reconciles to each year's audit schedule and matches the methodology of the published 22-year analysis of Jericho's budget practices. The State Comptroller's 2016 audit used a slightly different framing for FY 2013-2015 ("operating surplus"), but the underlying numbers reconcile.

Adopted Budget vs Final Budget is a meaningful distinction. The Adopted Budget is the voter-approved budget at the May vote. The Final Budget is what the budget became after mid-year revisions — mostly voter-authorized capital reserve appropriations and EBALR draws. Final Budget is typically $10-20M higher than Adopted Budget. The workbook labels which is which on every tab.

ST-3 Actual (the column from the appropriation budget master drafts) is total actual expenditures including Operating Transfers Out. It reconciles to the audit's Total Expenditures and Other Uses Actual line, which is why the per-year Budget vs Actual tabs show small or even positive variances at the Grand Total level — capital transfers run high in any year with a voter-approved capital project. That is not a contradiction with the audit's underspend finding; it is the same money, viewed against a different denominator.

The workbook is not an interpretation. It is a compilation. The interpretation lives in the articles. If a reader disagrees with the framing — manufactured surplus, fulcrum shift, the line-item forensic — that is a fair fight, and we welcome it. The numbers are not the fight. The numbers are the record.

The workbook also is not a forecast. The 2026-27 appropriation budget master draft is included only because it provides the most recent ST-3 Actuals for FY 2024-25, by long-standing District practice of publishing prior-year ST-3 columns in each new budget book. The 2026-27 budget itself will not have audited actuals until the FY 2027 audit is filed in late 2027 or early 2028.

Every cell is open. Every formula is visible. Every source is named at the top of every tab. If a number in the workbook is wrong, name it. Cite the source PDF and page. Show the math. We will publish the correction prominently and credit the source that issued it.

We are not asking residents to take our word for any of this. We are asking residents to open the workbook, read the audit, and decide for themselves.

Download the entire workbook here

Single .xlsx file. All formulas open. Recommended starting points: Summary, then Audit Comparison, then State Audit 2016, then Long-Term Trend. The seven Budget vs Actual tabs are the line-item forensic detail. The five Raw — PDF tabs are the chain of custody.

Once the workbook is open, every figure cited in "They Were Told. They Did It Bigger," the forthcoming follow-up, and any subsequent Jericho Voice piece — can be verified in five minutes or less.