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Due to unpaid invoices, KSU lost access to a vendor travel processing system that maintained supporting documentation for some travel expenses selected for review. As a result, testing could not be performed on documentation from the system to determine whether staff reimbursements processed through that system were valid and allowable. Though KSU can regain access to the records upon payment of its outstanding balance, KSU failed to ensure continued access to its records. As stated in Finding 15, KSU has an obligation to properly maintain its financial records in accordance with both state and University policies and to ensure adequate support is available for fiscal monitoring and oversight.

From individual staff files, 20 staff reimbursements were selected for review to determine if these expenditures were supported, approved, and allowable. When support for these expenditures was requested, KSU staff explained 11 of the travel reimbursements had been processed in an outside system named Concur. KSU purchased Concur to assist in processing staff reimbursements beginning in 2017. After travel documentation was uploaded into the Concur system, KSU did not maintain hard copies of the travel documentation. Because the University failed to address its outstanding balance with the vendor in FY 2022, KSU could not access the stored supporting documentation to substantiate the expenditures. Due to this limitation, review of 11 selected transactions totaling $18,241 could not be performed. As identified in Finding 8, testing of the remaining nine reimbursements found two reimbursements with a total of $1,502 in unsupported expenditures and one instance where the per diem rates used were higher than the reported allowable rate.

Accounts Payable staff reported that using Concur for processing travel ended in the spring of 2021 and that leadership made the decision to pay a monthly fee of $142 to access the documents. The reasons given by KSU personnel for discontinuing Concur was that it was not used during the pandemic and the cost of using the program.

In confirming that KSU did not have access to Concur documentation, we found that KSU’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) was not aware that Concur had been discontinued. After contacting a Concur representative, the CIO was told that KSU signed a new contract on October 28, 2021 for the lowest tier of services effective November 1, 2021, because KSU planned to revert to a manual process. The CIO was also told that KSU had 5 outstanding invoices totaling $684 as of August 2022. While three of these invoices were paid, KSU had two outstanding invoices and did not get access to the documentation before fieldwork ended.

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