10 May 21st - May 27th, 2026 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | excluded. Over various two-week periods that auditors analyzed, the highest percentage of audited transactions was only 23.9%. The lowest was only 6.5% of auto- matically processed transactions. This meant that unallowable purchases or transactions with missing documentation likely went unnoticed. The ESA program often failed to conduct timely reviews of unallowable transactions or those with missing documentation, resulting in the potential misuse of $86,599. Even when the ESA program identified that state funds were misused, it didn’t always follow up to ensure the funds were recovered. Between March 2025 and October 2025, the Auditor General’s Office reviewed 15 transactions that ESA management had identified during its weekly audits. Four were unallowable expenses, and 11 of them were missing required documentation. Still, the Auditor General found that ESA program management failed to conduct a timely review of the audit results or take action — such as issuing a termination letter or reporting the account to the Arizona State Board of Education for collection — on 14 of them. Management failed to take action to recover state funds misappropriated for planter boxes, a refrigerator, gym equip- ment, a generator, curtain rod brackets, a dashboard camera, a home security camera and bathroom accessories. It also failed to follow up on cases involving missing docu- mentation for purchases of tuition — in one case, the provided “documentation” was a handwritten bank transfer payment receipt for $1,000 — as well as a telescope and a raised garden bed. Even after these accounts were identified for misspending, they continued to spend the state’s money through the program. Adding to this problem, the ESA program didn’t have “documented” internal policies to guide employees in manually reviewing and approving transactions, other than what is publicly available in the Empowerment Scholarship Account Parent Handbook. Formal training also wasn’t provided to employees to ensure they understand the documentation requirements when a new handbook is developed. In its response, the Department of Education cried poor, saying it would docu- ment its policies whenever lawmakers deigned to properly fund its operations. On this score, the Auditor General appeared to agree, writing that “although the Program has received appropriations to fund its oper- ations, the resources provided may not have been enough based on Program growth.” Two families were put on a fast- track for expense approvals after meeting with the ESA program’s executive director. ESA program executive director John Ward directed his former deputy director to add two families to a “high-risk/ exclusion list” that allowed their transi- tions to be “manually reviewed and receive expedited payment and reimbursement processing,” according to the report. Instead, Ward said the former deputy director “erroneously” added these families to the conflict-of-interest logs, the report stated, which is how auditors discovered them. Between July 2023 and October 2025, these two families submitted 266 transi- tions. The Auditor General’s Office found “unallowable expenses” totaling $4,031, which included transitions that lacked evidence of a tutor’s credentials and uniforms from a non-qualified school. In its response, the Department of Education claimed that the two families were added to the list because Ward learned they were experiencing financial hardship. It also wrote that it “has concerns with how poorly this was presented in the auditor general’s report.” The ESA program failed to identify problems in 34% of purchases in a sample collected by the Auditor General. The Auditor General’s Office identified other potential conflict-of-interest issues. “Program management did not ensure $44,120 of transactions for account holders whom Program management and other Program employees had identified as having personal relationships within their employee disclosure statements received an independent review and approval to ensure they were allowable and followed program regulations,” the report reads. That included one instance in which an ESA program employee approved her own child’s tuition reimbursement. Also among those transactions, the auditor’s office found potentially unallowable expenses that included adult romance books, an Amazon Echo Show 5 and Nintendo Switch accessories. In its response, the Department of Education took particular exception to the claim about allowing purchases of adult romance books, which were revealed to be by author Ana Huang. “To be clear, the ESA manager did not purchase these books,” the education department wrote. “To attempt to impugn her because of purchases by an ESA holder who is related to her in some fashion is very low.” The department also claimed that the Auditor General’s Office had no relevant training to decide what books are and aren’t allowable. “We do not believe there are any ESA families clam- oring to have the auditor general decide which books their children should read,” the education department wrote, adding that “auditors are trained in numbers, not in principles of censorship.” In one of those instances, an ESA employee “initially rejected” a tutoring reimbursement transaction due to “insuf- ficient documentation.” The account holder “resubmitted the transaction with the original documentation,” and a different ESA employee missed the docu- mentation problem and approved it. 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