Charlie Schwartz and the Mystery of the Disappearing Billions

Prof. Charlie Schwartz, who should receive a medal for his tireless digging into UC's financial statements, has uncovered a discrepancy between the Regents' Budget (which includes general fund moneys etc.) and UC's actual expenditures. The discrepancies amount to several hundred million dollars a year, or 4-to-5 billions over the last decade.

Schwartz's repeated inquiries at UCOP (sent to Patrick Lenz, UC’s Vice President for Budget,  Peter Taylor, Executive Vice President for Finance ,as well as President Yudof) have so far gone unanswered.

While the discrepancy might well, in the end, be the result of mismatched accounting definitions, it's remarkable that UC finanaces are so byzantine that not even UCOP's top brass can make sense of them.

Unless, of course, something untoward is going on. Having been raised Catholic, the California Professor knows that to think ill of someone is a sin, but more likely than not to be right on the mark.