Crimes Unit Reviewing Report That N.C. A&T Funded Officials’ Relatives

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University “improperly directed more than $5 million” to students as financial aid, including over $780,000 “to students who were university employees, family members of university employees, or had a direct personal or professional connection to NC A&T,” a state audit concluded last week.

Further, on Friday, a spokesperson for the State Bureau of Investigation told Inside Higher Ed in an email that it will “conduct a comprehensive review of the findings.”

State auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican and a former University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees chair, wrote in last week’s “investigative special report” that “our review confirmed serious instances of deliberate funneling of public university dollars to NC A&T students with personal or professional connections to former senior university officials, and that these funds were awarded without evidence of merit or need based criteria.”

N.C. A&T asked Boliek’s office for the review after “current University leadership became aware of this practice following an inquiry into financial assistance promised to a student related to a University employee,” the audit says. University chancellor James R. Martin II told Boliek in a letter that “senior officials directly involved with the improperly awarded scholarships are no longer employed,” and that N.C. A&T intends to seek financial “restitution from the responsible employees.”

Boliek’s office analyzed the N.C. A&T Division of Business and Finance’s spending of “administrative recovery funds” from 2017 through last year. Those funds come from student fees associated “with services such as housing, dining, and parking,” the audit says.

The audit found the division awarded the following amounts to relatives of university-affiliated individuals, none of whom the report names:

• $73,063 to the nephew of the former executive director of N.C. A&T’s Real Estate Foundation;
• $23,052 to the daughter of a member of the N.C. A&T Center for Teaching Excellence External Advisory Board;
• $22,545 to the son of a former part-time English instructor;
• $18,707 to the son of the former associate vice chancellor for campus enterprises; and
• $14,888 to the daughter of the former assistant vice chancellor for business and finance.

Also, “following a discussion between the former Associate Vice Provost for Enrollment Management and the former Director of Financial Aid Operations, a hold was placed to allow the former Associate Vice Provost’s son to remain enrolled at NC A&T despite having an outstanding account balance for the remainder of that semester,” Boliek wrote. “The student also received an award of $10,000 in [Aggie Club] scholarship funds, which greatly exceeded the just over $2,000 that was budgeted for that scholarship.”

The audit says, “The former Associate Vice Provost’s influence over the University and Aggie Club failed to align with the University’s compliance and ethical conduct policies.”

In a statement, Martin said, “The amount of financial assistance a student receives should never be a function of who they know.”