With less than one month until the January 1, 2014 deadline, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents is expected to vote Friday on a financial transparency policy regarding allocation of funds.

After nearly $650 million in reserves surfaced in the spring of 2013, the state Legislature ordered the board to create a financial transparency policy to show how funds and reserves were allocated or saved for specific purposes. The reserves were largely generated from tuition increases at UW System universities.

During their October meetings, the Regents decided to postpone voting on the policy until their December meetings after discussion grew heated about appropriate reserve amounts.

The proposed policy includes tables of each UW System school and its funding for faculty compensation, reductions in each university’s budget and expenditures for university facilities, including the new power plant at UW-Madison.

Thursday’s committee meetings also included informational reports on faculty turnover and compensation, after a report came out showing more than 1,000 faculty members had left the UW System in the past two years. No decisions were made regarding faculty compensation or turnover, as the Regents approved an increase in salary for UW System administrators in October.

Other agenda items for Friday’s full-board meeting include:

• Update on the Flexible Option program, which launched last month.
• Approval of a Kinesiology Ph.D. program at UW-Milwaukee.
• Approval of a School of Business at UW-Platteville.
• Vote on a UW-Madison data analysis research agreement with Pfizer, Inc., allowing for more than $900,000 grant to the institution. The grant will facilitate data analysis completed under Dr. Kevin Buhr from the Department of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics for four years.

To see the full financial transparency policy from the Business and Finance Committee of the Board of Regents, click here.