I bet you are thinking to yourself, “Hey, I wonder what the Alumni Business Office is up to these days!” Well, let me tell you!

With our 2017-18 fiscal year ending on 6/30/2018, we are currently engaging in our annual audit. An audit is a standard procedure for any organization of our size.  With almost $20 million in assets, we want to make sure that our financials reflect an accurate picture of our income, expenditures, assets and liabilities. The audit also looks for things that could be harmful to our organization: fraud, incorrect accounting, managing contracts, and general risk prevention.

The Process

In order to present the audit to the Finance Committee and the Board of Managers in November, we actually start the work in June.  We begin with interviews and sharing information with our internal auditor from the IU Foundation.  Our business office processes fiscal year end transactions and analyzes financial activity for accuracy. Our external auditors (currently BKD) are with us on-site for a few weeks throughout July and August to analyze our financials from journal entries, investments, staffing, asset management, internal controls and other essentials. They also interview our CEO, Treasurer, and all Alumni Business Office staff to confirm that they have no concerns.

BKD reports initial findings to the CEO, Director of Finance, Treasurer, and Chair of the Board, and then the auditors present a report that contains the opinion (either unqualified, qualified, or adverse) and our completed financial statements for the fiscal year to the Finance Committee and then again by the Board of Managers in November.

While there have been times that the IUAA has needed to make adjustments due to the auditor’s findings, we have always been presented with a clean, unqualified opinion. That just means that the auditors agree that we have used Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) appropriately. Previous audit findings have allowed us to improve our operations annually and we had our first completely clean audit (no adjustments or negative findings) in many years in 2017.

Our audited financial statements are made available to the public. It is a lengthy read but feel free to reach out if you are ever looking to kill time and get to know our financials!