The Budget: First, let's preserve. Then let's question - Part 4 (adding revenue & expense)

In our last iteration of looking at UCLA budget documents versus UC's version of UCLA's budget, we focused on the expense side. It appeared that the (unaudited) financial statements issued before former CFO Agostini came on board tended to produce higher expenditure figures than those arising from (audited) UC documents. CFO Agostini called into question the validity of past UCLA statements (implicating administrators who had responsibility for accurate reporting), and got himself fired.

Let's now look at expenditures (previously discussed*), revenues, and surpluses and deficits (revenues minus expenditures).

The top chart below - which blog readers have already seen - shows the expenditure side. The middle chart shows revenues. And the bottom chart shows surpluses and deficits.

 

The top chart shows expenditures as UCLA presented them running above UC's version of those expenditures. In contrast, the middle chart shows that the revenue figures from the two alternative sources run close together. The bottom chart shows that UCLA's pre-Agostini figures show the campus to be running a chronic deficit. But UC's version of the financials, with their lower expenditures, shows a mix of surpluses and deficit. It appears that Agostini based his budget book figures for 2023-24 since his estimates seem match UC's figures for that fiscal year.

There are some caveats to note. First, none of the figures are current. Agostini's budget book had macro figures for 2023-24, but only unit (micro) figures for 2024-25. The old UCLA-derived series ends in 2022-23. 

Second, when you look at the macro level, you are seeing everything from hospital revenues to state allocations to professional school supplementary tuitions, etc. Many of the revenue sources are not fungible, i.e., you can't take someone's payment for cancer treatment at the hospital and use it instead to hire an administrative assistant for the English Department. 

Third, the unit level (micro) figures that Agostini provided show some units with surpluses and others with deficits. But at the unit level, revenues are often allocations by someone. For example, the Academic Senate is said to be running a deficit, i.e., expenditures > revenue, in the budget book. But the revenue of the Senate is an allocation. The Senate isn't a fee-for-service operation. If it were given a bigger allocation, it could be in surplus. Some other unit, of course, would presumably get less as a result, were such a reallocation to the Senate made. Thus, much of a unit's financial position is really a choice of allocation, i.e., a judgment as to what a particular activity is worth. It is not the same as a commercial business running in the red or in the black. The budget book does not reveal how the unit allocations of revenue are made.