The Budget: First, let's preserve. Then let's question - Part 2

As blog readers will know, UCLA's former CFO Steve Agostini was under pressure from the Academic Senate to produce usable data on the campus budget so that proposed budget cuts could be examined. He eventually produced a budget document, but shortly afterwards made comments about the budget as it had been previously managed and documented that led to his rapid termination.

The problem here is that removing the CFO does not remove underlying issues of budget management or accounting. As blog readers will also know, yours truly quickly downloaded available UCLA financial accounts that Agostini had criticized and preserved them so that they wouldn't vanish as quickly as he did.*

There are overlapping reports on UCLA expenses available from 1) UCLA for the period 2002-03 to 2022-23 (unaudited reports), 2) UC as part of its systemwide (audited) financial reports from 2015-16 to 2024-25,** and 3) the Agostini report for 2023-24 (only).***

The chart above shows UCLA expenditures as reported from the three sources. The key takeaway is that the numbers do not agree. There could be all kinds of reasons for the discrepancies including alternative definitions of revenues and accounting methodology. Still, why there are differences is something for the Academic Senate and its relevant committees to be analyzing. If you don't have numbers that you understand, you can't address underlying budget issues.

When a new permanent CFO is selected, that person should be committed to presenting reports that make clear what UCLA's financial situation actually is.

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*You can find the downloaded documents, related items, and other budget documents at:

https://archive.org/details/ucla-budget-book-v-final-feb-2026.

**The UC documents do not break out revenues.

***The Agostini budget document had unit-level budget data for 2024-25, but did not provide a total for expenses.