A search than began more than a year ago for an internal auditor has ended for Tucson’s largest school district.
Tucson Unified School District’s Governing Board approved the hire of Demetrius C. Lee, a former international senior auditor for the Air Force Audit Agency.
Lee has a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s degree in accounting, according to Anna Maiden, the district’s human resources director.
“It’s a unique kind of position,” Maiden said of the internal auditor job. “It takes a certain skill set.”
That skill set includes an understanding of public entities, she said. Lee has that. At his former job, he was responsible for auditing Air Force activities and programs.
Lee will be paid about $80,000, which is higher than the originally proposed $75,000 salary for the position. That’s because “it’s taken us a year to hire someone,” Maiden said.
For TUSD, the new internal auditor would work on projects assigned by the chief financial officer and the Governing Board.
Board member Mark Stegeman said at a meeting Tuesday evening that he’d been pushing for the creation of the internal auditor position for more than five years. “I’m very glad to see this come to fruition,” he said.
The board would eventually work to establish policy structured around this position, he added.
