UH tightening up on coaches with delinquent travel accounts

The financially challenged University of Hawaii athletic department has begun cracking down on coaches and staffers deemed long delinquent in repaying the school for travel advances.

The action comes in the wake of a UH internal auditor’s report that some coaches, including one who owed $4,800, have taken a year or more to return unspent university funds. Another coach took more than four months to repay $6,540, and a separate coach waited two months to return a travel advance for a trip that had been canceled. In another case, $4,700 was reported stolen from the coach’s office safe.

In 2011, a coach was so far in arrears that officials said he was given a deadline by which to write the school a check or be left home from a road trip. He reportedly complied on the day the team was to leave.

The report, which was commissioned after the Stevie Wonder debacle and was obtained by the Star-Advertiser under the state’s open-records law, said "78 percent of the excess travel advances were not repaid within the required 21 calendar days after the end date of the trip…"

The amounts ranged from $200 to $13,000, the report read.

The lagging reimbursements were considered dire enough that soon after taking office in mid-January, athletic director Ben Jay gave delinquents 30 days to square accounts or face action. At that point, officials said, seven coaches totaling 12 claims, were given written notice.

UH policy says that "after 60 days the university may, under Internal Revenue Service regulations, report the travel advance as income to the traveler if the travel completion (report) is not submitted."

Jay said Friday that all have since addressed the overdue obligations.

The department has run at a deficit for eight of the past 10 years, including $1.8 million in red ink for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2012.

In addition, the report read that 50 percent of the travel advance requests that auditors reviewed "over estimated" the cost of lodging or ground transportation expenses.

But people in the athletic department said the flip side is they sometimes have to wait months for reimbursement by the UH system or are forced to call around to see where their check is and when they might get it.

One athletic figure, who asked to remain anonymous citing fears that future reimbursements might be "put on the bottom of the pile" in retribution, said some coaches have had to wait as long as four months for reimbursement of travel expenses.

Another said his experience has been that "as long as the paperwork is in order" it is rare for reimbursements to take more than "a few weeks." At that point, the coach said, "you call around to see where it is at and what’s happened."

A separate report by the Board of Regents Task Group on Intercollegiate Athletics expressed concern that coaches are sometimes given in excess of $30,000 at a time to carry for per diem and expenses for the coaching staff and players.

The internal audit report suggested the department "evaluate the feasibility of obtaining pre-loaded debit cards with specified dollar amounts to cover student-athlete per diem" and that coaches be considered for "travel credit cards or traveler’s checks" when on department business trips.