What the audit found
The Texas State Auditor’s Office examined TSU’s finances for fiscal years 2023, 2024, and 2025, and conducted a deeper review of financial reporting for fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
Among the specific findings: records for 97 percent of the 60 vendors reviewed did not match corresponding contract documentation, with inaccuracies throughout whatever contract data existed; no annual physical inventory of university assets had been conducted since 2019; financial reports arrived at the state comptroller’s office nearly a year late in 2023; and budget accounts failed to reflect known staffing shortages.
Preliminary findings released in November had already shown more than 700 invoices totaling more than $280 million tied to vendors whose contracts had expired, and more than 800 invoices worth nearly $160 million that were dated before the purchases were officially requested or approved.
University response
TSU President J.W. Crawford III sent a 12-page letter dated Dec. 22 to State Auditor Lisa Collier outlining remediation steps the school had already taken.
“The University is committed to remediating the findings by the State Auditor’s Office,” Crawford wrote. “As an institution, we are implementing initiatives to improve and strengthen processes and internal controls across all areas of our operations, both financially and operationally.”
Crawford attributed part of the failure to approximately 200 vacancies — including in critical positions such as information technology — that had “fostered longstanding structural weaknesses that have had cascading effects over the intervening years, driving operational vulnerabilities and contributing significantly to the deficiencies identified in the audit.” He noted that the last comprehensive audit of TSU was completed in 2006.
In a statement Wednesday, TSU said it was “deeply appreciative for and highly values the work of the Texas State Auditor’s Office” and that “the University has adopted all SAO recommendations and concurs with the Auditor regarding the importance of predictable regularity of financial operations and timely, repeatable processes.”
Patrick noted that Crawford has agreed with the audit findings and has been working with the state auditor’s office to address them.
A decades-long pattern
Texas Southern, which has an enrollment of about 8,000 students, has experienced financial and management difficulties stretching back more than 40 years.
The current audit echoes a 1999 review by then-Deputy Comptroller Billy Hamilton, who delivered 124 recommendations to then-Gov. George W. Bush and Lt. Gov. Rick Perry. Hamilton wrote at the time: “For more than two decades, TSU has experienced serious financial and management difficulties. Most recently, these difficulties include declining student enrollment, critical financial audits, potential losses of federal funding, and contingency appropriations by the Texas Legislature to cover anticipated cash-flow shortages.”
In 2006, former university president Priscilla Slade was charged with embezzling more than $600,000 from the school. In 2020, allegations of bribery and kickbacks in the law school admissions process led to the ousting of then-president Austin Lane; an internal investigation found that students with low academic credentials were admitted and given more than $430,000 in scholarship money, and that cashier’s checks and money orders were found stashed under an admissions official’s desk calendar.
Patrick said in November that the legislature had “continued year-after-year to try to help the school” and that “it appears the legislature has been misled over this time period on promised improvements in accounting practices and contracting.”