A resident undergraduate student taking 15 credit hours pays $270.12 in student fees per semester. This money includes fees for computing, fine arts, health and recreation.
The Associated Students of the University of Utah want to know exactly where that money is going.
As a member of the Board of Trustees, ASUU President Ben Lowe formally requested an audit of all student fees. Although Lowe has not yet determined what the depth and scope of the audit will be, he wants to determine whether or not student fees are spent the way they are meant to be.
“There needs to be accountability for where student fees are spent,” Lowe said. “We need to know where they are going.”
ASUU leaders have been investigating how student fees are spent for months, according to Lowe, and they have found many numbers that do not quite add up.
For example, the ASUU activity fee from all students enrolled during Fall Semester should have been $446,114. According to George Lindsey, ASUU accountant, ASUU received $542,343. Some semesters ASUU gets much less than the organization should receive.
“That could be a lot of different things,” Lowe said. Any number of exceptions could cause the numbers to not add up, but nobody seems to know why they do not.
The internal audit will try to answer all of those questions and find out how various groups use student fees.
“It will help provide accountability to those who do receive student fees,” Lowe said. “We want to make sure everyone is accountable who uses student fees.”
After analyzing the issues, ASUU decided an audit was the best way to find answers to all of these questions.
“We decided we needed to take a more forward approach,” Lowe said. “We’re going to see if it can help shed some light on this.”
A typical audit requires three to six months to complete, according to Randy VanDyke, U internal audit director. Audits involve a review of pertinent policies, analysis of the data, and analysis of sample transactions.
“It’s unusual for the ASUU president to request an audit, but certainly appropriate,” VanDyke said. VanDyke cannot remember ASUU ever requesting an audit before.
“I hope that in the last few years [an audit] hasn’t been done, because they sure missed a lot,” Lowe said. He said that at least in the last 10 years no one has looked at student fees in such an in depth way.
Although ASUU has not recently investigated the way fees are spent, audits are typical for most organizations, according to Ryan Wilson, ASUU finance board director.
“It’s general accounting,” he said. “In any financial area there’s always auditing. It’s a clean procedure to always make sure all monies are accounted for.”
An audit explaining how ASUU receives its money will help the budgeting process, according to Lindsey. If ASUU knows more precisely how much money they should receive, they can “make that money available to as many student groups as possible,” Lindsey said.
According to Lowe, the administration supports ASUU in requesting the audit.
“Students don’t have a lot of money to give for their educations,” Lowe said. “It’s important that student fees are being used to a good purpose.”