As I reported last night, the University of California, San Diego, has told its students that the Internal Revenue Service is looking at “all payroll, accounts payable, student accounting, and other financial transactions processed by the campus in 2005.”
UCSD spokeswoman Dolores Davies said she has no additional information on the audit, explaining that the IRS has not told the campus what’s it’s looking for or what sparked the inquiry.
“The IRS doesn’t normally tell you,” she said.
Davies said the campus, and other branches of the University of California system, have been audited many times in previous years, though she said most of those inquires were “really focused.”
I asked Calvin Johnson, a tax law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, who recently left a stint working for the federal government, for his thoughts. Based on the e-mail the university sent to students, Johnson said the audit “hits me as routine.”
A spokesman for the IRS did not return a call for comment this morning.