You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
A state audit of New College of Florida found that officials overpaid employees and vendors and failed to collect more than $160,000 in outstanding student balances, The Tampa Bay Times reported.
The audit is largely focused on financial missteps between January and December 2022. But it also found issues in 2023, the year Governor Ron DeSantis stocked the board with conservative trustees and tasked them with overhauling NCF. Some of NCF’s financial practices ran afoul of state law, according to the audit.
In 2022, under the leadership of the prior board and former president Patricia Okker, NCF overpaid a vendor by almost $15,000, failed to collect on delinquent student accounts adding up to $163,626 and inadvertently paid some faculty members an additional paycheck, totaling $250,596, the audit found.
In July 2023, under the guidance of the new board and President Richard Corcoran, a former GOP lawmaker and DeSantis ally, NCF paid $96,267 to faculty members who had not received the extra paycheck in 2022 “to equalize those payments with the compensation” of other faculty members, the audit found. Doing so reportedly violated state law.
“Since the payments were made after the employees had rendered services, did not increase the employees’ base rate of pay, and did not meet the statutory requirements of a bonus, the payments represent extra compensation prohibited by State law,” according to the audit report.
NCF also improperly paid Okker after the new board fired her and began to reshape New College. Okker, who began a 12-month sabbatical following her termination in early 2023, was paid $384,868 for the 2022–23 fiscal year. Much of her salary—$236,073—was paid out of state appropriations, violating a Florida law that caps state funding for administrative salaries at $200,000. Another administrator was reportedly paid $18,874 above that cap. Such funds should have been paid by the NCF foundation, as is common elsewhere, the audit found.
NCF told The Tampa Bay Times the college is taking corrective action and establishing new protocols.
