In Report 2016M-328, the State Comptroller did not just say Jericho UFSD was overestimating its budget. He said where. Six line items, by name. We have now pulled every audited financial statement from FY 2017 through FY 2025 — nine consecutive fiscal years following the report — and put each year's audit page next to OSC's list. The same six categories that were padded in 2014-15 are padded every single year for the next nine. $91.9 million in cumulative underspend in those five audit categories alone. 86.6% of the District's entire post-audit operating underspend is concentrated in the categories OSC explicitly told the District to fix.

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 very next fiscal year, FY2017, manufactured surplus hit $17.9 million — the highest in 22 years.

That piece made the case that the pattern continued.

This piece shows where it lived.

From Report 2016M-328, page 5, in the words OSC chose to print:

Six categories. Identified by name. Documented by the State Comptroller as the specific line items being padded.

The audit report does not stop at "Jericho overestimates appropriations." It goes one level deeper. It hands the District a list. It says: these are the buckets you are using. It then notes — explicitly, in the same paragraph — that the District padded the same line items in the next budget cycle.

That was the pattern as of mid-2016. The audit period ended May 24, 2016. The District filed a Corrective Action Plan within the 90 days required by Section 35 of General Municipal Law and Section 2116-a(3)(c) of New York State Education Law.

OSC's six line items map onto five aggregated categories in each year's audited Schedule of Revenues, Expenditures and Changes in Fund Balance — the schedule that, by law, presents Original Budget, Final Budget, and Actual side by side for every general fund category. Here is the mapping:

These are not interpretations. These are the section headings the auditors use, in print, in every published audit. The audit pages are public. Anyone with the PDF and ten minutes can verify any number we cite.

For each of the five audit categories, we pulled the Final Budget, the Actual, and the underspend (Final Budget − Actual, before encumbrances) from each year's published audit. We did not interpret. We did not estimate. Every figure below is the number printed on the schedule page of the audited financial statements for that fiscal year.

Read that bottom row. Thirty-one point three million dollars under budget in teacher salaries alone, across the nine fiscal years the District has filed audited financials since OSC told them to stop padding teacher salaries.

The category never came in on budget. Not once. The smallest single-year underspend, in FY2021, was still $2.2 million. The largest, in FY2017 — the year right after the audit — was $5.4 million.

Twenty-six point six million dollars budgeted to serve children with disabilities and not spent on them.

There is no inflation argument here. The Final Budget for SWD has barely moved over a decade — $20.95M in FY2017, $21.08M in FY2025. The underspend, year after year, is real money that was budgeted, levied, collected, and not spent on the students it was supposed to serve.

In FY2022 — the largest underspend year for this line — the District budgeted $20.83 million for Programs for Students With Disabilities and spent $16.44 million. Twenty-one percent under budget on a Students With Disabilities line, six years after the State Comptroller named it as a line being padded.

Smaller in absolute dollars, but the most consistent of the five. Underspend every single year for nine years. The OSC report cited "bus rerouting" cost savings as the District's stated reason. Cost savings that show up nine years in a row are not surprises. They are the budget.

Same pattern. Same nine-year run. $9.8 million in cumulative underspend on the line OSC named "plant maintenance."

This category is broader than what OSC named — it includes Social Security and Workers' Compensation alongside insurance and State retirement — so we are giving the District the most charitable possible accounting and using the full audit-section total. Even at that broader scope, nine of nine years come in under Final Budget.

The five audit categories above — covering the six line items OSC named in 2016 — collectively show $91,872,058 in cumulative underspend across the nine fiscal years from FY 2017 through FY 2025.

The District's total operating expenditure underspend across that same nine-year window — every general fund category combined — was $106,114,986.

The math:

$91,872,058 / $106,114,986 = 86.6%

Eighty-six point six percent of every dollar Jericho UFSD has come in under budget on, since the State Comptroller named the line items being padded, has come from those exact line items.

Read that twice.

This is not the kind of number that happens by accident. This is not "we budgeted conservatively for unforeseen expenditures." When 86.6% of your underspend is concentrated in five specific buckets that the State Comptroller publicly identified by name, your contingency story is not a contingency story.

It is the budget.

We need to spend a moment specifically on FY2017, because that is the year — the very next fiscal year — that the District was operating under the Corrective Action Plan it had submitted to the State.

Here is the FY2017 audit page, as filed:

Five categories. $13,846,762 in underspend, in the five categories OSC named. In the year right after OSC told the District to stop overestimating those categories.

The total operating expenditure underspend that year (Total Expenditures Final Budget $118,966,577 − Actual $103,603,461) was $15,363,116.

$13,846,762 / $15,363,116 = 90.1%

Ninety percent of the entire FY2017 operating underspend, in the year directly after the State Comptroller's audit, came from the five buckets OSC named in 2016.

When you combine that with the $2,751,040 in revenue over Final Budget that same year, you get the manufactured surplus the published article cited: $17,888,211 — the highest in 22 years.

That is on pages 51-52 of the FY2017 audited financial statements. It is filed with the Office of the State Comptroller. Anyone with the PDF can verify it in five minutes.

There is one defense the District can mount against the data above. It is the defense we expect to hear, so we will address it directly.

Look at the trend lines in the five tables. The OSC-named category underspends, while present every single year, are smaller in absolute dollars in the most recent audited years than they were in FY2017-FY2018. Teacher salaries underspend dropped from $5.4M (FY2017) to $2.9M (FY2025). SWD from $3.6M (FY2017) and $3.9M (FY2018) down to $1.3M (FY2025). Plant maintenance from $1.4M to $0.4M. Across all five categories combined, FY2017's $13.85 million of underspend in OSC-named buckets shrank to $7.08 million in FY2025.

A fair reading would be: "We listened to the State. We tightened the budget. The underspend is going down."

Here is what that reading misses.

First, the OSC-named categories are still the entire game on the expenditure side. In FY 2017 they accounted for 90% of the operating expenditure underspend. In FY 2025 they accounted for 88%. The share has barely moved across nine years. There has been no migration of the underspend to other expense categories. The District is not over-budgeting Board of Education or Central Administration or Finance or Staff to compensate. When the District tightens, it tightens in the OSC-named categories. When the District loosens, it loosens in the OSC-named categories. The buckets the State Comptroller named in 2016 are still the buckets the underspend lives in today.

Second, the manufactured surplus has not declined at the same rate as the operating underspend. Operating expenditure underspend fell from $15.36 million (FY2017) to $8.09 million (FY2025) — a drop of $7.28 million. Manufactured surplus fell from $17.89 million to $11.64 million — a drop of only $6.25 million.

The difference shows up on the revenue side.

Revenue over Final Budget has ramped from ~$2.5 million in the early audited years to $4.0+ million in FY 2024 and FY 2025. As the operating expenditure underspend declined, the revenue under-budgeting accelerated to fill the gap.

The total surplus game has not stopped. The fulcrum has shifted. The District is still over-collecting from residents — but where the over-collection used to show up as money budgeted and not spent, it now increasingly shows up as money projected as not coming in and then collected anyway.

Same surplus. Same magnitude. Different mechanism.

If the District wants credit for "improving" on the expenditure side, fine — the data supports a partial tightening on the OSC-named lines. The data also shows that the manufactured surplus, the actual outcome residents pay for, has been roughly constant at $12-18 million a year for the entire post-audit period.

Tightening the expenditure projection on one side of the budget while loosening the revenue projection on the other is not improvement. It is rebalancing.

The game OSC documented in 2016 was: collect more than you tell residents you will spend, and call the difference a surplus. That game continues. It just no longer hangs entirely off the expenditure side.

The District's stated explanation, recorded in the OSC audit report, was that cost-saving programs (specifically bus rerouting) reduced expenditures, and that they "overbudget appropriations as a contingency for unexpected expenditures."

We will take that explanation seriously for one paragraph.

A contingency is, by definition, planning for events that may or may not happen. The signature of a real contingency is that sometimes the contingency hits and you spend the money, and sometimes it doesn't and you don't. Across nine consecutive audited fiscal years, every single one of the five OSC-named categories came in under budget. Not once did the contingency hit. Not in teacher salaries. Not in SWD. Not in transportation. Not in plant maintenance. Not in benefits. Not in any year. Not in any combination.

A "contingency" that pays out every year, in the same five buckets, for nine years running, is not a contingency. It is structural over-collection.

A "cost-savings program" whose savings are predictable enough to recur in the same categories at roughly the same magnitudes for nine years is, again, not a savings program. It is the budget.

The State Comptroller flagged the rhetorical move in 2016: "However, if fund balance and reserve funds grow without being used, taxpayer money is withheld from productive use and the tax levy may be higher than necessary." (Report 2016M-328, p. 6.)

The District's defense in 2016 was the same as the District's defense today. The State documented in 2016 that the defense did not hold up. Nine more years of audited financials confirm it.

Every figure in this article is reproduced in a downloadable workbook that compiles all five appropriation budget master drafts (FY 2018-19 through FY 2026-27) plus all nine audited financial statements (FY 2017 through FY 2025). The workbook contains:

The workbook is published as primary source material. Anyone — residents, journalists, trustees, the District itself — can open it and verify any number cited in this article or any prior Jericho Voice piece.

Link to workbook

If any number in this article is wrong, name it. Cite the audit page. Show the math. We will publish the correction prominently and credit the source that issued it.

The 9-year totals are:

The Final Budget figures are on each year's audit Schedule of Revenues, Expenditures and Changes in Fund Balance — Budget and Actual. The Actual figures are on the same schedule. The underspends are subtraction.

If the District believes any of those subtractions is wrong, it has every audited financial statement on file and can show its own math.

If the District believes the categorization is wrong — if Pupil Transportation is somehow not "contract transportation," if Programs for Students With Disabilities is somehow not the "Students With Disabilities program," if Central services is somehow not "plant maintenance" — then the District is welcome to explain to its residents why the audit categories that everyone has been reading for a decade do not mean what they say.

If the District believes nine consecutive years of $91.9 million in underspend across the categories OSC explicitly named is a contingency that has not yet hit, then the District is welcome to explain when, exactly, it expects the contingency to hit.

If the District believes the OSC report did not name those specific categories, the OSC report is on file at the State Comptroller's office. We have linked it. We have quoted page 5. We have included the page reference on every citation in this article.

We are not asking the District to prove the State was wrong in 2016. The State already adjudicated that. We are asking the District to point to a single year, in a single OSC-named category, where the published audit shows actual spending matched the Final Budget.

There is not one. We have looked at all forty-five category-years (5 categories × 9 audits). The District is welcome to find the one we missed.

In December 2016, the State of New York wrote down a list of six budget line items it identified as being structurally overestimated by Jericho UFSD. The District agreed in writing to corrective action.

Over the following nine fiscal years, those same line items — every single one of them — came in under Final Budget every single year, totaling $91.9 million in cumulative underspend, accounting for 86.6 percent of the District's entire post-audit operating underspend.

The audits are public. The State's report is public. The workbook compiling them is published.

Same six. Same nine years. State already on the record.