Posted: May 09, 2011 1:40 PM EDT
Updated: May 10, 2011 10:26 AM EDT
By Eric Flack
LEXINGTON, KY (WAVE) - At a time of tuition hikes and budget cuts it has never been more important for state universities to watch their money. Now, a WAVE 3 Troubleshooter investigation has uncovered large amounts of school property missing at the University of Kentucky. Taxpayers spent millions of dollars on all the equipment, but the school argues the loss to taxpayers is far less than the original price tag.

Money is tight on a college campus and you don't have to be a finance major like Ben Blanford to know the best way to save is to keep track of what you've got.

"Especially as a college student I can't afford just to go buy another one if I do lose something," Blanford said.

At the University of Kentucky there's a lot more lost than found. We uncovered pages of school property that's disappeared. Some of which seems pretty hard to misplace.

"How does that walk out?" said Economics major Nathaniel Graham as he looked over the list. UK's missing inventory list from 2008-present includes a $43,000 micro-computer, a $40,000 rehabilitation machine, a $25,000 surgical laser, and a $19,800 digital copier. Also on the list: a hospital stretcher, upright freezer, bookcases, treadmill, leg curl machine and ice water dispenser.

All of it lost by the University of Kentucky.

Hundreds of computers are also gone. Total sticker price for missing property at UK in the past 3 years: $2,900,000. And most of those items were bought with taxpayer money.

The numbers caught some students by surprise.

"That is a very large sum," Graham said.

So how did UK lose track of all that stuff? School spokesman Jay Blanton told us they think about 10% of it was stolen. The rest simply disappeared.

"You have issues," Blanton said. "Things get lost or things get sent to surplus that didn't get scanned appropriately."

Blanton said everything on campus is tagged with a barcode, like this one. And and at the end of every year they go through with a scanner, and scan everything on campus. Anything the school can't find ends up on the missing inventory list.

Blanton said with 40,000 students and employees on campus on typical day, keeping track of university property can be a challenge. In fact UK had a tough time even telling us for certain how much missing property it actually has. They sent us three different versions of the missing inventory list in response to our open records request.

The third chopped the price tag of everything UK can't find from $2,900,000 to a little more than $218,000. The schools reasoning: depreciation.

"You buy your car for $15,000 five years ago," Blanton said, "today it's worth half that."

UK used depreciation to assess no value to hundreds of the items on it's final version of the missing inventory list, the one they asked us to use for this report. Some items that UK lost and listed as having no value were bought back in the late 90's. Other items, including a Dell Laptop Computer purchased for $1,528 in August 2006, were less than five years old but listed by UK with a net value of $0.

"It's value is what it is at after how ever many years of use"" Blanton said. Pressed on whether that was a fair calculation since UK would have to replace the missing equipment with a new item, Blanton reasoned the school would have to replace the property at some point, regardless.

The University of Louisville also track's missing inventory, but the list of items that it can't find is much shorter than UK's. According to records from U of L, it has about $421,000 in missing school property over the same time period.

U of L's list reveals $76,000 data analysis machine, a $52,000 computer system from the Cancer Center, a nearly $20,000 lab analyzer, a $5,000 scrubber used to wash lab equipment and a $2,000 golf cart are all unaccounted for.

Spokesman Mark Hebert said U of L also uses depreciation to asses a lower price tag to the equipment than it originally cost. Hebert said because everything on U of L's list is more than 3 years old, accountants at the school list every item item on its missing property list as having a zero dollar value.

Meanwhile, Blanton said with a 2.5 billion dollar annual budget, UK is bigger than U of L and should be expected to have more losses. And when compared to one other big state university, the missing inventory at UK doesn't look quite as bad.

Records from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge show in the three year period from 2005-2008, LSU reported a staggering 5.4 million dollars in missing property.

LSU's missing inventory list includes six piano's, two boats, a mobile restroom trailer with wheelchair lift, and a spectrometer which used to measure light, valued at more than $104,000.

Neither U of L, UC or LSU asked to have it's missing inventory valued at the depreciated value as opposed to the original value. Meanwhile, officials at the University of Kentucky have started tracking it's property with bar codes to keep better tabs. They also think some of the things on the missing inventory list aren't really lost, they just never got scanned.

"I would argue we don't have huge problems with inventory issues," Blanton said.

But Ben Blanford, a senior, doesn't buy that.

"A lot of times even though things depreciate, even though the university doesn't have a use for it they could sell it off to somebody else that might have a use for it," Blanton said. "The value of something does not depreciate all the way down to exactly zero."

But Nathaniel Graham, a senior, finds some value in the university's defense.

"$218,000 for old PC gear is a reasonable assessment probably," he said.

With 61,000 items on campus, Blanton said missing inventory is only 1.6% of school property.

"Given the volume of items we are dealing with given the number of people in this city we are dealing with I think we are doing a pretty good job with inventory," Blanton said.

But students like Blanford think UK is losing sight of the big picture.

"Somehow they got to come up with a system to become more accountable," Blanford said. "Especially at a time like this when they are constantly tuition hikes, and budget cuts, stuff like this is inexcusable."

http://www.wave3.com/story/14600146/uk- ... l-property