“We haven’t sat down and talked about it (the cost),” said Levy. “The auditors will say how much it will be and we’ll have to determine if we can pay that amount of money.”
Levy refused to reveal how much the university is willing to pay because he said it would harm the negotiation process. “If someone said that it’s going to be a couple of hundred thousand dollars, I’ll say, ‘Ahh.’ But if I tell you the number, I’ll tell the auditor.”
The RSU audit, which was approved at the last board of directors meeting on Jan. 15, calls for Ryerson’s administration to “conduct a review of staff relations, election procedures, services, finances and overall functioning,” by Feb. 5.
The board also voted in favour of an amendment to the motion to review the past 20 years of the RSU.
The motion was moved after board member Abdullah Snobar made allegations of fraud and corruption against RSU executives, Muhammad Ali Jabbar, Rebecca Rose and Toby Whitfield.
Snobar said an audit would examine the health and dental plan’s cash reserves, which he claims is short of $300,000.
Vice-provost students Heather Lane Vetere said the university won’t know the cost of the audit until the RSU chooses a third-party auditor and negotiates the terms of contract. “The RSU will work out the terms of what they’ll be doing with the review . . . The consultant knows the work, and they’ll be able to determine whether they can meet the terms or not.”
Although the RSU has not yet signed a contract with an auditor, board members Abdullah Snobar and Dana Houssein have been in contact with accounting firm Deloitte & Touche.
Gary Moulton, a forensic auditor at Deloitte, said it costs about $10,000 for a one-year audit. A review spanning 20 years could easily cost $200,000 and perhaps more, depending on the number of people working on the audit and the number of hours required.
“The cost is very hard to determine. But for 20 years, it’ll be substantial,” he said.
Moulton also said finishing a 20-year audit in two weeks is “simply out of the question.”
Although the board voted in favour of reviewing the past 20 years of the RSU, Snobar now says he has no intention of going back that far. “Toby and Jabbar kept doing amendments . . . They said, ‘No, we want to do 10 years. No, we want to do 20 years.’ So we said, ‘OK fine, let’s do 20 years because we’re wasting time here’ . . . But the auditors will only go back as far as they deem necessary.”
Snobar said only parts of the review will be completed by Feb. 5, which will be prioritized by members of the review committee.
But RSU president Jabbar said Snobar cannot simply make changes to the original motion. “We have to support it. The board has decided this . . . I tried to put forward amendments to make the motion more realistic. We said, ‘Set the date to March 12.’ But Snobar and his camp voted them out . . . Any changes (now) need to go back to the RSU board of directors.”
