McLean County Times

State Sen. Chapin Rose (R-Mahomet) was among several lawmakers who questioned administrators at Northern Illinois University over repeated shortcomings as revealed in a 2020 audit.

Rose acknowledged University President Lisa Freeman for expressing the need for lawmakers to help fix the issues NIU faced during an April 27 Legislative Audit Commission hearing, but still wanted answers about why some shortcomings have appeared on multiple audits.

"When I see these repeated audit findings, the takeaway is whatever institution or state agency that is in front of us isn't learning from its past mistakes and isn't getting better," Rose said. "The last thing I'm going to say is this repeat audit finding that keeps coming up about universities for failure to document payroll, frankly, if everyone is required to fill out a payroll sheet to provide accountability for their time to taxpayers, then every state employee should be doing that. So, give us a lost of the findings that don't serve the common good and don't put on that list that certain employees should be treated differently than other employees for the purpose of not turning in timesheets, that's what accountability is all about."

The Office of the Auditor General found a number of issues at NIU during the 2020 audit including the university's failure to document required information technology risk assessments that were related to student information security. The auditor general suggested NIU perform and document risk assessments to fix the issue to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The audit also revealed on multiple occasions since 2012, NIU failed to create adequate internal controls over contracts to make sure its approved prior to performance.

The audit also found there weren't proper controls over I-9 forms and it recommended the university step up its control over that process to fix the issue.