LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – The Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approved a one-year audit contract capped at $131,750 plus $225 per hour during a virtual meeting Monday, along with a new finance director job description.

The contract is with Mauldin & Jenkins Certified Public Accountants, an Atlanta-based firm, and covers the 2025-26 fiscal year and the restatement of the 2024-25 fiscal year and ancillary services through FY 2029-2030. The work is set to be completed by Nov. 15.

The board approved the contract in a 5-0 vote.

Audit contract details

Interim Chief Financial Officer Kyna Koch said the cost is already accounted for in the district’s budget.

“And is actually less than we expected given our current situation — we were thrilled with the bid,” Koch said.

Koch said she believes this is Mauldin & Jenkins’ first school district audit in Kentucky, but that the firm works with school districts of more than 100,000 students throughout the Southeast.

“Quite frankly when I spoke to the folks at KDE they were thrilled because we’re running kind of short of auditors who want to do school district audits — so all around I think this was a win-win for everyone,” Koch said.

New finance director position

The board also approved a new job description for the position of Director of Finance. Acting Superintendent Dr. Bill Bradford said the title will replace two associate director positions.

“Which will not only save the school district money but it’s also going to streamline our work and align internal controls to make room for a more efficient unit,” Bradford said.

Koch said the position will be posted as soon as possible following the board’s approval.

Closed session

The board went into closed session for more than an hour to discuss pending investigations that could lead to employee discipline. When the board returned, it took no action and adjourned the meeting.

According to Bloomberg, the review recommends that the FCA evaluate whether large language models developed by companies including OpenAI and Anthropic should fall within the regulator’s remit if they play an increasingly significant role in consumer financial services. The report was led by Sheldon Mills, an executive director at the FCA, and was published on Monday.

The review concludes that the UK’s current activity-based regulatory framework does not require a wholesale overhaul. However, it warns that continued advances in AI capabilities and wider adoption of AI-powered financial products could expose gaps in existing oversight if technology providers increasingly influence regulated financial activities, Bloomberg reported.

Among its recommendations, the report calls for a review of the FCA’s regulatory perimeter and suggests strengthening the regulator’s authority under the UK’s Critical Third Parties regime. Such changes could allow the watchdog to exercise greater oversight of technology providers whose services have become integral to financial markets, including major AI developers and cloud infrastructure companies.

The recommendations reflect growing concern that artificial intelligence is reshaping how financial products are designed, distributed and used. Banks and other financial institutions are increasingly deploying generative AI to support customer service, fraud detection, compliance functions and financial guidance, while consumers are also turning directly to general-purpose AI tools for financial information.

The review also raises broader competition and market structure issues. As financial institutions rely on a relatively small number of AI model developers and cloud computing providers, operational dependencies could become concentrated among a handful of technology companies. That concentration may create systemic risks if disruptions or failures affect widely used platforms, while also potentially shifting market power away from regulated financial institutions toward large technology providers.

Those concerns mirror recommendations made earlier this year by the UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee, which urged the government to designate major AI and cloud providers as Critical Third Parties, arguing that regulators need stronger supervisory tools as digital infrastructure becomes increasingly central to financial stability.

The FCA launched the Mills Review in January to examine how artificial intelligence could transform retail financial services by the end of the decade. The consultation considered AI’s impact on competition, consumer behavior, market structure and the regulatory framework, with the aim of identifying whether financial regulation should evolve alongside technological change.

According to Bloomberg, the FCA will now consider the report’s recommendations, including whether its regulatory responsibilities should be expanded to reflect the growing influence of general-purpose AI systems in financial services. Any changes to the regulator’s statutory powers would require action by the UK government and would form part of broader efforts to balance innovation, consumer protection, financial stability and effective competition as AI adoption accelerates.

Source: Bloomberg

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the city state’s central bank and financial regulator, has joined forces with major financial institutions and FinTechs to release a white paper aimed at keeping AI agents in finance operating within safe limits.

The paper, called Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime (SAFR), lays out an industry-built framework designed to let AI agents perform financial tasks in a manner that is safe, secure and dependable. It has been produced under BuildFin.ai, the MAS programme that backs the responsible creation and rollout of AI tools across the financial sector.

The push comes as AI agents take on more autonomous work at a pace that makes hands-on human oversight impractical. In response, firms require real-time controls that keep agent behaviour inside the mandates, policies and risk limits they have defined. SAFR answers this with a series of governance checkpoints that check and log each action an agent proposes before that task is carried out.

The framework extends the AI Risk Management toolkit created through MAS’ Project Mindforge, concentrating on how protections can be put into practice at the moment an agent acts. The white paper maps out how measures such as policy bound execution, real time validation, auditability and interoperability can be woven into system operations, giving institutions the confidence to deploy agents consistently.

Industry participants have already tested SAFR in several settings. These include agent-assisted payments and treasury work, where agents handle routine transactions inside set mandates to cut friction and lift efficiency; wealth management and advisory processes, where agents examine documents and produce structured assessments within tightly defined task limits to speed up compliance reviews; and client engagement, where agents create insights and draft materials within approved content boundaries so staff can serve clients more productively.

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