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"The flow of funds has reached a level of intransparency that even the federal states can hardly see," criticizes the Court of Audit: Students on campus (archive picture from 2018)
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The victims are the students: The Federal Audit Office has heavily criticized the use of university pact funds in the federal states and at individual universities.
That emerges from a still unpublished report to the budget committee of the Bundestag, which SPIEGEL has received.
On the one hand, the Court of Auditors complained that large sums were used inappropriately or that they could no longer be checked due to unclear accounting.
The state reports on the funds are "incomplete and non-transparent".
The other problem: unspent funds.
At the end of 2018, the federal states and individual universities still parked almost 3.7 billion euros in accounts that they had received from the federal government as part of the University Pact (HSP) - in some cases years earlier.
Some of the universities still bunkered funds from the University Pact I, which expired in 2013.
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"The flow of funds in the HSP has reached a level of intransparency that even the federal states can hardly see", criticize the auditors.
Since the information did not include all funds from the University Pact, the remaining spending should actually be even higher, the report says.
The auditors criticized the practice last year, but the problem has apparently worsened.
The money should actually be used to create new study places.
"Instead, entire years of students at individual universities could not benefit from the additional funds," says the report.
The largest share of the money goes to North Rhine-Westphalia, where the auditors tracked down remaining funds amounting to more than 1.9 billion euros.
"This corresponded to the flat rates for 80,681 additional first-year students," calculate the examiners.
The unused amount is still higher than the amount that the North Rhine-Westphalia universities can expect from 2019 until the end of the University Pact 2023: Until then, money should flow for a further 76,882 freshmen.
Money for a parking garage instead of university places
The report also provides glaring examples from NRW for the misappropriation of funds.
Accordingly, the funds were used, among other things,
to finance the management of a "Collegium Musicum",
restore a grand piano and pay musicians' fees,
to finance a grandstand in the student theater,
equip the workplace of a research assistant and
To finance new construction measures such as the construction of office and seminar buildings and a parking garage.
According to the Federal Audit Office, there was a lack of a common understanding of the program and the possibility of sanctions if the federal states or universities misappropriated the funds.
Individual countries have signaled that neither the misappropriation nor the hoarding of money that exceeds the need would be a reason for repayment.
Failures also at the Ministry of Education
The examiners also criticized the Federal Ministry of Education.
It had failed to regulate liability and repayment obligations in the university pact.
The ministry announced that it would either use previously unspent funds until the end of 2023 as intended or reclaim them.
However, the authors of the report dryly comment that this is "unlikely" and demand that further payments be blocked until the correct use of the funds previously distributed has been proven.
According to the university rectors' conference, the funds from the university pact and the subsequent financing agreement ZSL (future contract to strengthen study and teaching) make up an average of almost a quarter of university budgets.
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