Lehighton Area School District hopes to engage the services of an Ohio company to complete a technology expense audit, at no cost to the district, which could identify overspent funds.

Business Manager Edward Rarick said The SpyGlass Group LLC looks at different areas such as internet and cellphone contracts looking for billing mistakes and dormant or unused services.

“They’ll do an audit free of charge and then they come to the district with those results and a cost recovery proposal,” Rarick said during a board workshop Monday night. “If they find for example that the district has been billed fees or something similar that has been out of line for a number of years, they will offer to go and recover those fees, but they do ask for 50% of what they recover.”

Following the audit, SpyGlass will also provide a cost savings proposal if it finds services the district isn’t using or no longer needs. Should the district implement those changes, however, the company asks for 12 times any monthly service elimination and cost reduction savings up front.

“I don’t recommend taking them up on that part of the proposal,” Rarick said. “If they would find a three-year savings, for example, you’d have to pay them the first year savings up front. The district did get involved with this company in 2016 to do the cost savings part of this. It paid a pretty substantial upfront cost to change some plans and we found no documentation where we validated any of the savings so I can’t say whether that came to fruition or not.”

According to the SpyGlass website, it has over 13,000 clients across many sectors including education, health care, construction, local government, insurance, manufacturing, nonprofits and more.

“Our risk-free technology expense SnapShot Audit specializes in finding errors, overcharges and inefficiencies in bills, contracts, usage reports and customer service records to help you avoid telecom billing overcharges,” the website states.

The board consensus Monday was to move forward with a vote on the technology expense audit, which comes at no cost to the district.

“I think it would be beneficial to see that analysis,” Director Jeremy Glaush said. “There are a lot of times when fees are retired or done away with, but you keep getting charged. This audit would alert us to those situations.”

Lehighton has a voting meeting scheduled for Feb. 28 at 7 p.m.