As of April 7, the Board of Trustees approved the release of the Plante Moran audit, which analyzed the financial data for the Wright State Applied Research Corporation (WSARC) for the fiscal years 2011 to 2015.
The audit was conducted to identify issues in both financial and management transactions
“In an effort to advance transparency about recent financial and management issues, today the Wright State University Trustees waived privilege on that detailed audit report of WSRI operations and have made it available to the public upon request,” Michael Bridges, chair of the Board of Trustees, said in an e-mail to the university.
The release of the audit is an attempt to promote transparency about the recent financial issues.
To complete the audit, Plante Moran analyzed approximately 600 “invoices, several award agreements and corresponding subgrant agreements relating to high risk vendors.”
The audit revealed numerous occurrences where, “WSRI/WSARC utilized the H-1B Visa program to obtain foreign labor which was contracted out to external companies (ie., to obtain foreign labor for clients).”
These clients include WebYoga, UTC, LexisNexis and UES. Activity may have occurred with companies such as SOA Architects, Vedainfo Inc. and MRLets Technologies.
The audit also looked at the hiring process for WSARC, the Name in Grant was used, which is “used to hire employees with specialized skillsets required by an award agreement.”
According to the audit, as of June 30, 2015, 53 modifications have been made in order to hire 88 individuals while using the Name in Grant process.
“While there may be a legitimate purpose for a mechanism to hire individuals with specialized knowledge outside of the University hiring process to meet project demands, it appears that the use of Name in Grant has allowed a circumvention of WSU’s hiring process,” the audit said.
The audit reviewed the WSARC to identify high risk transactions, which showed lack of documentation.
Other citations include a lack of control pertaining to WSARC debit cards, conflicts of interest in former employees, inconsistent invoices between WSARC and the company Advratech.
However, hundreds of pages of the audit are redacted, causing speculation from the public.
