Lehighton Area School District tabbed Barbacane, Thornton & Co. on Monday as its audit firm for the next three years.

The district will pay the Delaware-based firm $36,000 to complete its 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 fiscal year audit. Maillie LLP, the district’s previous auditing firm, received over $40,000 each year.

Last week, the district’s finance committee heard from BT&C managing partner Pam Baker as well as Jeffrey Weiss, a managing partner with Zelenkofske Axelrod, the only other firm to submit a proposal for the job.

Both firms said they were contacted by school board director Joy Beers and informed about Lehighton’s request for proposals and touted their experience, calling themselves niche players in the public education auditing field.

“We want to be cost effective while getting to the right answers for you,” Baker told the finance committee. “We’ll hone in on where the potential is for you to have additional procedures to decrease risk.”

David Bradley was the lone school board director to vote against the hire, citing a Reading Eagle article from 2013 when the firm was working for Reading School District.

At the time, the district accidentally applied $15.6 million it received for the 2010-11 school year to the 2010-11 and 2011-12 fiscal year budgets.

According to the article, the accounting error was initially missed by the auditing firm. Barbacane, Thornton & Co., at the time, issued a statement claiming the mistake was because of inaccurate information provided by the district.

Bradley recommended tabling the motion to hire BT&C until the firm selection process was “done right.”

A third firm did submit a proposal, but Lehighton’s business administrator, Patricia Denicola, said they wanted to be paid for a presentation to the district’s finance committee.

During Monday night’s board meeting, Bradley asked why the district did not find out how much money that company was asking to receive.

“The district does not pay someone for a presentation to the board,” Superintendent Jonathan Cleaver said. “If we did that, you would have multiple companies throwing together proposals just to get a quick $100 from the school district. The thought that you are even making this a question is concerning to me.”

Lehighton’s board unanimously ordered a forensic audit in June following a motion by Bradley. BT&C proposed a forensic audit rate ranging from $80 per hour for a regular employee to $250 per hour for one of the firm’s partners.

“When you are looking at a forensic audit, you’re most often going to have a partner doing that work,” Denicola told finance committee members last week.

According to the motion approved Monday night, additional agreed upon procedures or forensic audit services approved by the board will be billed at the hourly rate.

Denicola said Lehighton’s annual audit for the state has to be in by Nov. 30.