Carroll ISD (CISD) has received a nearly $2M refund from the Texas Educational Agency (TEA) after someone discovered that the school district has been overpaying its share of “recapture” payments to the state.
The refunds are in the amount of $1.9M for the 2019-20 fiscal school year, which will be transferred to the school district’s current 2020-21 fund balance, and $72,981 for the 2020-21 fiscal school year.
CISD was slated to pay more than $28.6M in recapture payments to the TEA for the 2020-21 school year alone.
Recapture, or the Robin-Hood plan as it is now more infamously known, requires wealthier school districts to send portions of their locally collected tax dollars to the TEA. The TEA then redistributes these funds statewide to less affluent school districts.
According to William Wooten, CISD Assistant Superintendent for Financial Services, a “systemic reporting error” resulted in the district paying more than required to the state in recapture payments.
He explained to the Community Impact Newspaper that the district makes payments from its maintenance and operations fund to Southlake’s tax increment financing district. But the district’s bookkeepers mistakenly reported the revenue as earned rather than payments made, resulting in a higher tax rate.
Wooten stated that he discovered the error after the school district received a notice from the TEA on September 27th informing the district that about $2M in recapture payments were still owed to the state. Wooten did not believe this was accurate and started digging through the school district’s financial reports until he discovered the error.
With this discovery, Wooten intends to press the TEA to look back to years before the 2019-20 fiscal school year for the possibility of even more refunds for the district. However, current TEA practice only allows corrections or refunds for only up to three years prior.
“TEA said they only want to go back three prior years, but I need for them to go back at least ten years, so we got a lot of work to do,” Wooten stated.
