BATON ROUGE — A state legislative audit released Monday says that Thrive Academy repeatedly skipped vital steps in obtaining and vetting contracts that opened the school to potential fraud and inaccurate financial records.

The report says that the Baton Rouge public boarding school did not properly monitor contracts, failed to obtain proper approval and neglected vendor performance reviews. This is the second consecutive report in which auditors found that the school has skirted contract regulations, the report said.

For some professional and consulting services done with school funds, proper contracts were not inked, which the audit notes opened the school up to a greater "risk of misunderstandings and/or nonperformance of needed services without any protection."

The audit says that payment for 18 contracts was incurred before receiving approval from the Division of Administration at the Office of State Procurement, a required step in the contacting process.

Forty-five payments totaling $119,133 were made to vendors for services that were provided anywhere between 13 days to 11 months prior to Thrive receiving approval from OSP. A total of $928 in expenses was incurred for two of these contracts before the contracts were approved by Thrive management.

"However, payments were not made until Thrive management and OSP approvals were received," the report reads.

The report adds that Thrive did not provide evidence to show that 70 percent of professional and consulting contracts reviewed were monitored in accordance with the monitoring plan outlined in each contract. Two contracts did not include any monitoring plan for the vendors.

The report also outlined that Thrive did not properly monitor employee leave records for four consecutive years. Thrive employees also failed to accurately report information in the state’s movable property system.

The complete report can be found here.