They want to see it

Spending at the University of California’s Oakland headquarters has nearly doubled in recent years, and official staff counts vary by nearly 500 people, depending on who’s doing the counting.

So on Wednesday, state lawmakers authorized an audit of UC’s Office of the President to determine whether its $686 million annual budget — more than twice that of the Legislature — is money well spent.

The eight-month, $418,000 audit comes at the request of two influential assemblymen, Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, chairman of the budget committee, and Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, chairman of the budget subcommittee on education finance.

“As UC advocates for more state funding, and as it contemplates potential student tuition increases in the future, the Legislature needs a clearer picture of UC costs,” the lawmakers wrote to the chairman of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, D-Pomona (Los Angeles County), to ask the panel to conduct an audit.

UC’s regents are expected to raise tuition for fall 2017 for the first time since 2011. Based on that and a March audit revealing that UC admits thousands of higher-paying out-of-state students with lower grades and test scores than state residents as a way to raise cash, Ting said he wants to know how UC can become more efficient and enroll more Californians.

McCarty told the committee, “We don’t know where all the money is going.”

UC officials countered that they’ve been overwhelmed with six state audits in three years...

Full story at http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/With-tuition-heading-up-state-will-audit-UC-9135047.php

They seem insistent: