Oversight Tightens at CSUN

In response to a state audit that found federal earthquake repair money and campus workers were used to move furniture for CSUN President Blenda Wilson’s husband last year, the university announced Wednesday that it has begun to tighten financial monitoring on campus.

The changes--which university spokesman John Chandler said could cost millions as they are implemented during the next three years--include hiring a new campus auditor and purchasing advanced accounting software that will link several of the school’s individual bookkeeping ledgers.

Currently, more than 300 university department and non-school related budgets are kept on separate computer systems, CSUN officials said.

As is the case on most of the 23 Cal State campuses, Chandler said, school administrators do not have an efficient way to audit those ledgers--a problem that contributed to the months-long delays in getting to the bottom of accusations levied in July against Wilson’s husband, Louis Fair Jr.

Fair used CSUN employees in November 1997 to move office furniture for Office Future Systems, of which he is executive vice president.

Although it is still unclear how the workers were paid, an audit completed in October by California State University headquarters revealed that Federal Emergency Management Agency money given to CSUN after the 1994 Northridge earthquake was used to rent the moving truck.

The revelation surfaced after a federal criminal investigation into the alleged misuse of FEMA money was dropped in September.

Chandler said an in-house auditor will make it harder for funds from university accounts to be used for unsanctioned purposes outside the account’s mandate.

“The whole notion of an [in-house] auditor is to have that person be like a watchdog,” Chandler said. “If we were ever to encounter that situation again, that would be something an auditor would immediately be dispatched to deal with.”

Otherwise, “the auditor would look for areas [on campus] where things need to be tightened up,” he said.

Such areas were discovered by a consultant group hired by CSUN, on the recommendation of CSU auditors. Asked recently to review the school’s fiscal operations top to bottom, financial consultants K. Scott Hughes Associates discovered that CSUN’s accounting methods are archaic when compared to procedures used elsewhere, Chandler said, adding that the problem exists throughout the Cal State system.

With the old accounting software still used on the 40-year-old campus, “it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the finances of such a large organization,” Chandler said. “There is currently not a good way for the administrators to look at the whole picture [of school finances] in a unified way.”

In addition to its $185-million operating budget, CSUN maintains smaller budgets for roughly 300 departments and five “auxiliary” services, Chandler said. The auxiliary budgets include those of the student union, on-campus restaurants, and a project to develop an $80-million biotechnology complex on the school’s North Campus.

Because each budget is kept on a separate computer system, Chandler said, auditing school finances is a monumental endeavor.

Along with several other CSU schools, university officials plan to update their computerized accounting system soon so that several budgets at a time can be reviewed from the same terminal, Chandler said.

“This will allow us to get a unified picture of the whole campus,” financially speaking, said Chandler. “One thing the consultants talked about was: If you are going to run a university and make effective decisions, you need to have comprehensive financial information about where the campus is at.”