Last fall an audit found employers in the Madison area involved with UW-Madison's work-study program owed the school a combined total of $150,000 in unpaid debts due to an accounting glitch that underbilled many of the participating organizations.
Under the work-study system, off-campus employers pay the university for the students employed through the program. The university then turns around and pays the students themselves, with additional money provided by the federal government. Though $50,000 of the initial debt has been repaid, negotiations are still underway to recover the other $100,000.
The outstanding debt amounts to only about 2 percent of the work-study program's $5 million budget, but $100,000 is still much more than chump change. The fact that UW-Madison can so easily mishandle $150,000 is troubling, particularly when it involves a program that provides employment to thousands of students.
Now that the mistake has been made, however, there is little the university can do other than to fix the offending glitches in its own billing process and continue working to recover the rest of the money. Unfortunately, many of the underbilled employers who now have the largest outstanding debts may have difficulty paying the bills due to late notice.
As the fault lies with the university, so does the responsibility of helping to work out these issues. It is important for UW-Madison to recover the money so we can balance our own budget in the short term, but in the long term the university has much more to lose by alienating or financially crippling its work-study partners.
The jobs that these organizations provide help to make college more affordable for thousands of students here at UW-Madison without putting as great a strain on taxpayers as many other forms of financial aid. For those reasons, consideration should always be given to the health of the work-study program as a whole—the university, students and employers.
