Tampa Bay Times shows little interest in USF’s internal audit problems

Today, the Tampa Bay Times ran a big headline about FAMU’s Division of Audit and Compliance, which conducts internal audits. Rattlers shouldn’t hold their breaths for the Times to write critical headlines about the internal audit findings at the state university that sits less than 35 miles from its main office.

According to the 2010-2011 annual report of the University of South Florida’s (USF) Audit and Compliance office, its investigations found three incidents of fiscal misconduct and two incidents of conflicts of interest.

“The three classified as fiscal misconduct…concluded that resources of the institution had been misused, resulting in unauthorized and/or inappropriate disbursements totaling $120,377,” the report stated. “The two conflicts of interest, related to investigations, impacted $22,205 in disbursements.”

The Tallahassee Democrat has also given little attention to the internal audit findings at Florida State University while printing long stories about internal audit issues at FAMU. The 2010-2011 annual report of the university Office of Audit Services found that overpayments were made to contractors that the university was billed for “questionable salary expenses.”

The Tampa Bay Times coverage FAMU’s Division of Audit and Compliance also contains sensationalism. It claims: “State leaders and law firms have been looking into more than a dozen university audits that seemed to have been essentially fabricated. Under the audit office’s former leader, 15 ‘executive summaries’ of audits were turned into university officials before any actual auditing was done.”

The article fails to show how anything was “essentially fabricated.” The fact that the office submitted executive summaries of 15 audits to the Board of Trustees and didn’t submit full reports is not evidence of that anything was “fabricated.” Nor does it prove that “audits were turned into university officials before any actual auditing was done.”

Even the information in the final paragraph of the Times’ own article contradicts that claim that “more than a dozen” audits were “essentially fabricated.” Rick Givens, FAMU’s new permanent vice-president of audit and compliance, found the information required to back up seven of the audit summaries. He is redoing the rest of audits that were reported in summary form to ensure that all the required information is on the record.

This just looks like another example of the business bottom-line driving news coverage. The Times seems to think that exaggerated reports about internal audit issues at FAMU will interest its readership more than information about the internal audit findings at USF.