Travel Focus Misses the Money Train
You may have seen the article in yesterday’s Daily Bruin about UCLA tightening up its rules on travel reimbursements. Why the tightening up?
…Public records documenting the travel expenses of the university’s top brass, obtained and published by the Center for Investigative Reporting in August, drew national scrutiny last summer for the luxurious travel accommodations of UCLA’s leadership, sometimes in violation of University policy. The accommodations and pricy travel arrangements bloated the university’s travel budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars…
Full story at http://dailybruin.com/2014/02/04/months-after-controversy-ucla-clarifies-travel-guidelines/
The problem with the original story is that it focuses on budget dust compared to the free-spending capital budget. There we are not talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. We are talking about hundreds of millions and a Board of Regents incapable of evaluating and monitoring the endless flow. We are talking about the myth that if it isn’t state money, it doesn’t cost anything. You read about it here. Sadly, you won’t read about it anywhere else.
It’s hard to stop the real money train: