U. Of Iowa Athletes’ Funds Not Used For Athletes

February 18, 2013 / Wrestling
Press-Citizen.com

http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20130214/NEWS01/302140023/Athletes-funds-didn-t-go-Iowa-athletes?nclick_check=1

University of Iowa Athletics Department officials last year erroneously spent thousands of dollars from a fund intended to support student-athletes to send administrators to sporting events.

The thousands of additional student-athlete support dollars the department spent on document shredding, displays for Carver-Hawkeye Arena, child care and legal fees, however, were no mistake, an official said Wednesday.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association each year provides collegiate athletes with funding designed to help them with personal expenses such as parking permits, travel costs and other needs that arise. In what UI Athletics Department officials described as an “accounting error,” they used more than $2,000 of that money to send administrators to wrestling and track events. That money has since been returned to the NCAA fund, said Rick Klatt, associate athletics director for external relations.

UI receives funding for student-athletes from the NCAA through two separate programs, the Student Assistance Fund and the Academic Enhancement Fund, Klatt said. Last year, it received nearly $382,000 from the former and nearly $69,000 from the latter, he said. The NCAA provided Division 1 universities a total of more than $66 million through the Student Assistance Fund last year and more than $23 million through the Academic Enhancement Fund.

The rules the NCAA uses to direct universities on spending the money are “deliberately broad” to provide the freedom to spend it as needed, Klatt said. With that in mind, he said he thinks the Athletics Department was in the right when it used $680 from its Academic Enhancement Fund allocation to pay a third-party company to shred student-athlete transcripts.


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