State Auditor Hector Balderas met with students Thursday to discuss the possibility of an additional audit of the University.
He met with about 30 students outside of El Centro de la Raza.
Balderas has been meeting with faculty, administrators and students throughout the week to decide whether a partial audit of the University's finances is warranted.
"I'd like to see where the money that was harvested from the different departments went and why it is that the money that disappeared from research hasn't reappeared," said graduate student Danny Hernandez.
Hernandez, who works for the City Council, said he was attending the meeting as a concerned student and community member.
Hernandez said another major problem is the use of funds for construction projects at the University.
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"If I had a second choice, it would be (to) take a look at the no-bid process that UNM is doing with many of their buildings," he said. "What they do is they have the Sandia Foundation take care of building something, and then they rent it back to UNM, but it's still, in a way, 'public money.'"
Hernandez said this procedure leads to a situation where there is no quality control in what students receive.
Lissa Knudsen, GPSA council chairwoman, said that it's rare someone of Balderas' stature would be willing to speak with UNM students about their concerns.
"I feel like this is an opportunity for us to really encourage the state auditor to help the University open up their processes, make them more transparent and really rebuild that trust that has sort of slowly been eroded over the last few months," she said.
Balderas said meeting with students was a crucial part of determining whether his office will go forward with a partial audit of UNM's finances.
"What I hope to do after the first phase of talking to students - and talking to administrators and getting everybody's sides of what's going on here - is that I will probably recommend a potential solution in terms of our involvement - whether it be an audit or whether it's a performance review or whether it's mediation between the president and the Faculty Senate," he said. "But I'm not going to do that until I get a lot of input.."
Balderas said the creed of a state auditor is one of independence and that interfering with the University's management structure is not something his job entails.
"At this point, we cannot take on the role of management or state an opinion on a management practice," he said.
If the University is in violation of its own policy on the use of administrative resources, however, the audit report could comment on that, Balderas said.
"As to whether or not the University should be hiring more and more vice presidents is probably a management question, but there's a fine line, because if they have policy procedures that they're violating in that expansion, or let's say that they have a mandate for so many faculty, or if they have a performance measure or ratio for faculty and students, we can probably comment that they're violating a policy," he said.
Knudsen said that if Balderas decided against doing an audit investigation on UNM that the topic should be pursued by students and faculty.
"I think then that this could become a campaign issue for the gubernatorial race," Knudsen said. "Meaning, if the governor and the state auditor don't feel that this is an important enough issue, then the faculty and the students and the staff that do strongly feel that this is important enough should go to whoever is running for governor and make this a campaign issue."
The state's gubernatorial race is scheduled for the fall of 2010.
Gov. Bill Richardson said in a statement Thursday that he "will attempt to facilitate a request by the faculty to the state auditor to audit issues related to University financial priorities."
Gilbert Gallegos, spokesman for Richardson, said the governor has not set a time frame for when he will move forward with the audit issue.
