November 18, 2020 – State universities are facing rising costs due to the pandemic and the Legislative Audit Commission passed a resolution filed by State Senator Chapin Rose to give the institutions better flexibility to pay bills.
“The COVID pandemic has caused significant financial drain on our state institutions of higher education,” said Rose. “The Commission’s decisive action today eliminates some of the red tape that hinders a university’s ability to deftly maneuver funds between categories. By providing greater flexibility, we are giving our institutions the potential ability to offset some of the direct losses of tuition and housing dollars that they have incurred.”
The resolution will allow universities to be released from restrictions on Indirect Cost Recovery funds. The funds come from federal grants with the intention to help universities with overhead costs related to the grants. Federal law, in many cases, does not work to restrict how the funds are spent, with university guidelines having strict rules about how the money can be spent and are not generally available to a university to defray expenses that occurred in other areas of a university’s operations.
Rose’s resolution will temporarily remove the restrictions on ICR funds, which will free those funds to be used as a potential source of revenue to help state-supported institutions deal with the costs incurred during the pandemic.
“I want to thank the universities for bringing this to my attention as a way to help minimize the impact of COVID’s financial drain on students and their families. But this isn’t limited just to the U of I. While each college is different in terms of the amount of ICR funds that they may hold, it will apply to all of the 4-year public institutions in the state. We simply have to provide our institutions as much flexibility as possible to weather this storm,” said Rose.
