MATT THOMPSON, Staff Reporter
After receiving a letter from the Washington state auditor’s office and recalculating the administrative fee, Central Washington University is set to credit $507,438 to the student Services and Activities fee fund.
Last week Connie Williams, assistant vice president of finance and business auxiliaries, estimated a revision of the administrative fees for fiscal years 2012 through 2014 would result in an $800,000 refund.
After detailed recalculation, the administrative fee reconciliation is $769,527. That includes the crediting of $507,438 from fiscal year 2012, the $175,669 adjustment to fiscal year 2013 as well as the $86,420 revision for the first year of the fiscal year 2014–2017 base-funding request.
“We have taken the SAO letter and we have responded based on our understanding of that letter,” Williams said. “And the administration felt this was an appropriate action to the letter.”
Due in part to the reconciliation of the admin fee, the S&A committee will be able to carry over approximately $1 million into next year’s S&A operating budget. As a result, the S&A committee has halted discussion of a 2 percent raise on the S&A fee for students.
The recalculation resulted in the removal of cost categories deemed questionably justified or incompliant with Washington state law by the auditor’s office.
“The primary thing that everybody has learned from this exercise is that there are certain costs that are appropriate and allowable to allocate to student activities based on their usage,” Williams said.
The categories were removed because they were found illegal included President James Gaudino’s office, the Board of Trustees, public safety and faculty relations. Categories withdrawn because they were insufficiently justified were public relations, business and financial affairs and facilities management.
Revisions were also made to the admin fee for the 2013 fiscal year supplementary request as well as to the base-funding request for 2014 to 2017 fiscal years.
Fiscal year 2013’s admin fee was reduced by 30.7 percent, or $175,669, to the total of $395,498. Because the fiscal year is not over and the admin fee for this year has not been fully allocated, the reduction will not be credited to the S&A fund but instead the admin fee allocation will be for only the revised amount.
The admin fee’s base funding amount has been reduced by 19.3 percent to a total of $361,866 per year and has been approved in the four-year base-funding budget for fiscal years 2014 through 2017.
This means the admin fee will receive this amount for the next four years without returning to the S&A committee for approval.
Two categories have been re-evaluated to find proper justification for the cost categories of information technology policy and management, as well as IT application & enterprise information systems management. These categories had been previously found by the auditor to be insufficiently supported and were therefore deemed questionable allocations.
Though the revisions based on the auditor’s letter have saved the S&A committee from spending $769,527, there are some on the S&A committee who do not feel the auditor’s office delved deep enough into the details of the admin fee.
“We’ve made a win, but at the same time we’re not done, because there is still the argument about whether any of it is allowable,” Kylea Wells Brown, S&A committee voting member, said.
