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An audit of employees by the DeKalb County School District has found $47,500 in payroll discrepancies, according to an April 21 press release.

The employee verification process was ordered by school Superintendent Cheryl Atkinson in February in conjunction with an independent audit of central office and school-based personnel.

The process also discovered seven discrepancies in payroll, including two employees who were no longer with the School District and five on leave that were not properly recorded.

The names and titles of the seven employees were not readily available, according to Walter Woods, school district spokesman.

These employees were overpaid by approximately $47,500. The district’s legal affairs department is investigating each case and will seek to recover any unearned funds.

“Every dollar counts,” Woods said. “An organization of our size should have had this in place...to prevent this kind of waste in the school district.”

Through the process, approximately 15,000 employees at the central office in all auxiliary departments and at the school level, were directed to verify their employment with the school district.

The process to date has identified 148 non-verified employees, most of them substitute teachers or part-time coaches.

“We expect some of them to be verified,” Woods said. There were no non-verified full-time employees discovered, he said.

The school district halted payments to non-verified employees beginning with the April 13 pay period, according to the release.

“Moving forward, employee verification will be an annual process to let the public know that our payroll and personnel records are accurate and up to date,” Atkinson said.

School board Chairman Eugene Walker said the process “validates that there is a good system in place.”

“We have better than 15,000 employees and 148 people out of 15,000 may have had some mix-up in their pay,” Walker said. “This is absolutely miniscule to me.”

Walker said the verification process confirmed that the finance and human resources departments are the “strongest and best-run” in the district.

The result of the process is “more of a positive than a negative,” Walker said. “That’s a pretty good record.”