Dear CFR Faculty,

A number of you contribute funds to the "institutional consulting" budget and then charge various expenses to this budget. When transactions are large and easily attributed to the individual using the budget this is easily accounted for and individual budgets can be maintained within the parent budget without an onerous burden on staff resources. However, a number of expenditures are frequently made for services on campus, such as photocopying, C&C charges, and mailing, and are not being appropriately identified when the expense is incurred and are thus not easily attributable to any particular individual when the aggregate invoice comes to the budget. This is a burden on the other PIs as well as on the College.

In the past, these charges, along with deficits incurred by individual PIs, have been absorbed by institutional consulting "reserve" budget funded by the dean's "tax" of five percent on all income to the fund. This "tax" has essentially become a fund for handling "bad debts" and is now in the red. Obviously, this is not acceptable.

In order to manage this budget appropriately, it is essential that you add YOUR NAME as well as the institutional consulting budget number to ALL purchases, travel arrangements, postage charges, telephone charges, C&C charges, express mail (FED X) charges, HSER center charges, and photocopy charges, both at copy centers and on the CFR copiers. Any of your graduate students or other associates charging to your balance in this budget must also provide YOUR NAME as well as the budget number at the point of purchase. Please ensure that YOUR NAME is identified with your deposits as well. Because Geetha is now providing reports on this budget, I expect that you will be receiving timely reports that allow you to monitor your income and expenditures closely. Deficit spending on this budget is unacceptable and any existing deficit expenditures must be transferred to another one of your budgets.

We will be monitoring this budget closely over the next several months. If unidentified charges continue to be a problem, the dean's tax on the income to this budget will increase substantially (perhaps as high as 15-25%) to create an acceptable reserve to pay for staff time spent tracking expenditures. Obviously, this is something I do not wish to see happen. Thus, I ask that you adhere to the new guidelines given above.

I also wish to point out that when faculty members retire, resign or otherwise leave the College, all funds remaining in their consulting budgets will revert to the institutional consulting "reserve" budget which is managed by the dean. Fund balances are not assignable to another faculty or staff member. Thanks for your cooperation.

B. Bruce Bare
Dean