Word: audits
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...latest draft audit report, HEW charges the SPH with mismanagement of almost half of the $37.1 million the school received in the three-year period under investigation. Throughout the text of the document, HEW officials charge Harvard with sloppy and insufficient record-keeping and faulty supervision of expenditures...
...final draft of the document, which HEW officials originally promised for last December, has still not been released. Richard Ogden, assistant audit director in HEW's regional office, refuses to comment about the content of the agency's charges, saying only that the final report will be ready sometime this December. Federal officials are even more tight-lipped about the investigation...
...agency's failure to uncover the documents that will vindicate the University. Thomas O'Brien, vice-president for financial affairs, predicts that HEW will eventually only demand that the University return a few hundred thousand dollars due to insufficient documentation--in contrast to the $2.5 million the original audit asserted had been misused. Both O'Brien and other University officials say the agency derived the $2.5 million figure after dissecting only a small part of the total--and then extrapolating the results...
University officials are even angrier about the audit's armchair attitude towards the school's salary certification system. "Our partnership with the federal government has evolved to the point where it has become very difficult for universities to keep accurate track of funds," says Howard J. Levy, assistant dean for financial affairs at the SPH. "It's hard to put a time clock in the head of a professor and see when he was thinking about which federally-funded project he may be working on," he adds. Scott says the HEW assessment of the University's record-keeping for wages...
...more simply when he says, "Harvard manages its funds in a way that makes sense to Harvard. HEW has criticized us for not documenting our expenditures very well--but they did not find the right documents." Both are convinced that when the University is allowed to scrutinize the audit in detail, the vast majority of the discrepancies will be "negotiated away." Meanwhile, in the Office of Research Contracts on the third floor of Holyok Center, professors continue to apply for federal grants. Of the 100-odd pages in the handbook the Office gives to prospective grantees, a little less than...